Quotes about Adolescence

I grew up an only child, and I always felt as if I didn't fit in. In middle school, in grammar school, and even high school, I just didn't feel like I fit in.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

Acting like a crowd of kids/ the mask was a thin thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness/ He was safe from shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in return/ They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought"?Lord of the Flies?

When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wrote in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandmas, not me.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty.

Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.

It wasn't easy. In junior high, I was voted "most polite," and it took some time for me to realize that being perceived as a "nice guy" and being a faithful Christian don't always go hand in hand.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

The "Dorky Girl Fantasies" trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the "Dorky Boy Fantasies" trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off).