Adolescence Quotes

“After having taken a long and hard look at the echelonment of the various appendices of the sexual function, the moment appears to have arrived to expound the central theorem of my apocritique. Unless you were to put a halt to the implacable unfolding of my reasoning with the objection that, good prince, I will permit you to formulate: "You take all your examples from adolescence, which is indeed an important period in life, but when all is said and done it only occupies an exceedingly brief fraction of this. Are you not afraid, then, that your conclusions, the finesse and rigour of which we admire, may ultimately turn out to be both partial and limited?" To this amiable adversary I will reply that adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word. The attractile drives are unleashed around the age of thirteen, after which they gradually diminish, or rather they are resolved in models of behaviour which are, after all, only constrained forces. The violence of the initial explosion means that the outcome of the conflict may remain uncertain for years; this is what is called a transitory regime in electrodynamics. But little by little the oscillations become slower, to the point of resolving themselves in mild and melancholic long waves; from this moment on all is decided, and life is nothing more than a preparation for death. This can be expressed in a more brutal and less exact way by saying that man is a diminished adolescent.
'After having taken a long and hard look at the echelonment of the various appendices of the sexual function, the moment seems to me to have come to expound the central theorem of my apocritique. For this I will utilize the lever of a condensed but adequate formulation, to wit:
Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“During childhood life is like dancing and later life becomes wrestling.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“A hallmark of female adolescence is the realization that you are being commodified. You then are developing a sense of self within a cultural framework that values you primarily as an object.”
― Natalie M. Esparza, Spectacle: Discover a Vibrant Life through the Lens of Curiosity

“Our teachers forgot to mention that by throwing our tassels in the air, we throw every shit anyone can ever give about us. The world says it cares, but it goes ahead and does something different. I wish we weren’t cared for later than we’re supposed to be cared for. It's like: 'You graduated college. There’s no way you have any trace of still being a scared child. Oh, you fucked up? Here’s a jail cell.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Philippe did not know how to express such a thought as: 'All too few are the occasions in life when, with mind content, eyes surfeited with beauty, heart light, retentive, and almost empty, there comes a moment for the senses to be filled to overflowing: I shall remember this as just such a moment.”
― Colette, Ripening Seed

“Tough men are tough not because they want to be tough, but because they have to be tough. Outgrow the adolescent fawning over being a tough guy, and you will become a tough man.”
― Criss Jami

“We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt think and skull-less.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“We leave the Dunkin' Donuts heavier with what we know of each other.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It was actually Nadine who'd insisted that I come with her, telling me that I wasn't social enough, that real life was not lived in books, that there was nothing wrong with a little lightness, a little carefree partying. She was right. Maybe if I'd listened to her a lot earlier, I wouldn't have missed out on my youth.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“The classroom is a special place. It’s one of the few times a group of different people have to be in the same room. Outside, it’s only strangers in subway rides for a few minutes. It’s rare. We never really know people again.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Least thing we can do is to wake up in the morning and protect the good things that were. The past deserves it.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We discard the elderly, but the elderly used to discard the elderly. Those old people we tease are just listening to our insults and not deciding to speak. They’re not stupid. They just understand. Old people are young people who’ve had a few more heartbreaks, thousands of more workdays, and who’ve prepared a dozen more eulogies.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Beat him until he softens. Lift his ragged body and raise him with your whiskey breath. Get him out alive. Watch from your grave as he beats his own child, because you beat him, because yours beat you, because his beat his, because his beat his...”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Lover winds a guitar string tight enough to slice your fingertip when you strum. It’s the guitar beat against the belly of the bluesman, sitting ugly on a stool, legs open in front of everyone. Lover is Winslow with sun blinding and wind sticking dust to your cheekbones when you peel out from the crater. The swirling force of cream stirring itself in a reheated cup of coffee steamed by exhaustion. The hands that stripped him bare in his sleep, played his hormones like a mean, magic riff 'til he woke up wet and high inside his bones.”
― Laurie Perez, Virga in Death Valley

“A number of scholars, many of them seeking to explain the appeal of the monstrous in pop culture, have seen the monster primarily as part of an inner horror show, the personal nightmares of the ego torn between a reptilian id and the moralistic superego. This interpretation understands the monster as a metaphor of human development, the demons that guard the gates of adulthood and emotional maturity. Monsters, according to this view, are primarily inner monsters. Our desire for them emerges from our desire to embrace our own darkness. This approach often makes the self, especially the adolescent self, the locus of understanding the horrific.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“Belonging to the peer group is paramount. One's whole sense of identity is coming together in adolescence. If one has a good foundation prior to adolescence, the sense of self can be preliminarily defined. Identity is always social―one's sense of self needs to be matched by others: one's friends, teachers and parents. Adolescence is the time the brain (frontal lobes) is reaching full maturity. It is a time of ideals, of questioning and projecting into the future. An adolescent needs to have the discipline of mind the philosopher Thomas Aquinas called studiasitas. Studiasitas is a disciplined focus on studies and thinking, a kind of temperance of the mind. Its opposite is curiositas, a kind of mental wandering all over the place without limits.

Healthy shame at this stage is the source of good identity, a disciplined focus on the future and on studious limits in pursuing intellectual interests.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“Immediately after the Christmas holidays I stopped speaking to her. The guy who had spotted me near the station seemed to have forgotten the incident, but I had been afraid even so. In any case, dating Bardot would have demanded a moral strength far superior to the one I could, even at the time, pride myself on. Because not only was she ugly but she was plain nasty. Goaded on by sexual liberation (it was right at the beginning of the 80s, AIDS still did not exist), she couldn't make appeal to some ethical notion of virginity, obviously. On top of that she was too intelligent and too lucid to account for her state as being a product of "JudeoChristian influence" - in any case her parents were agnostics. All means of evasion were thus closed to her. She could only assist, in silent hatred, at the liberation of others; witness the boys pressing themselves like crabs against others' bodies; sense the relationships being formed, the experiments being undertaken, the orgasms surging forth; live to the full a silent selfdestruction when faced with the flaunted pleasure of others. Thus was her adolescence to unfold, and thus it unfolded: jealousy and frustration fermented slowly to become a swelling of paroxystic hatred.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

“Everyone who is at all successful in comedy has had a secret comedy dork life in their adolescence. Whether it's sitcoms or stand-ups, wallowing in the muck of comedy and repeating classic routines and jokes through your teenage years is what gives every aspiring comic or comedic actor the seed of their absurdist imagination that later takes flower.”
― Rainn Wilson, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy

“It's all that time reading, dreaming, and goofing off with fellow oddballs where our best selves get to involve as teenagers.”
― Rainn Wilson

“After we graduate, our identities just become nervousness and worrying all the time.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Are you kidding? It was beautiful!' exclaimed the janitor. 'Just because you did something when you were younger doesn’t make it stupid. It doesn’t matter if it was a little college show or Broadway, meaningful things are still meaningful things. People can make fun of you for it, sour people, call you childish, but I been around a long time. Both of your two lives combined. And there’s no guarantee people get to do a great show of A Doll’s House ever again. Either life happens or death happens and we may never get another chance. Least thing we can do is to wake up in the morning and protect the good things that were. The past deserves it.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“The face Isaac made when bonding with his aluminum toy would have made you smile. The innocence of it. It was one of those mind-lending activities that make us like people—like spying on someone playing the piano or solving a puzzle. Every person looks like a child when de-seeding a pomegranate. If you watch someone open a juice box, however old, you’ll see them young again—their soft, wondering face. It’s one of the most ephemeral beauties for the eyes to partake in.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“After finishing his breakfast. Charlie decided to clean the kitchen, but wanted to do it entirely with one leg. He laughed his way through the cabinets, inside the sink, on the floor, under the table, and against the walls like a kid who gets a kick out of making things harder for themself. It was none other than the heart of sport, for what was a sport but a project made to be harder for a player? To pass the ball but only with your feet. To have three chances to bat. To play catch with a friend, but without gloves. The fun was to see if you could do it. But when non-athletic hardships come, the adults mysteriously run.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“After finishing his breakfast, Charlie decided to clean the kitchen, but wanted to do it entirely with one leg. He laughed his way through the cabinets, inside the sink, on the floor, under the table, and against the walls like a kid who gets a kick out of making things harder for themself. It was none other than the heart of sport, for what was a sport but a project made to be harder for a player? To pass the ball but only with your feet. To have three chances to bat. To play catch with a friend, but without gloves. The fun was to see if you could do it. But when non-athletic hardships come, the adults mysteriously run.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We think they’re better than us, the white-haired folks we call grandma and grandpa. But being old doesn’t mean you’ve adjusted to the loneliness. They are saddened, desiring, passionate folks who want adventure.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“The obsession with sin destroyed the mind of several girls who were at the beginning of their adolescence, normal and easy-going. If there was a dearth of sin, sin at any cost had to be manufactured, because forgiving the sinners was a therapeutic exercise, popular with the rabidly virtuous.”
― Kamala Das, My Story

“Helen was happy for them, and disdainful, and jealous of them for getting more of each other while she got less of them, and, mostly, astonished-that life could actually move forward like this into adulthood.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Remember that after ninety seconds an unimpeded emotion will begin to transform on its own. It is often how we fret over a feeling that creates suffering and maintains the intensity and duration of that feeling in our lives.”

Excerpt From
Brainstorm
Daniel J. Siegel, MD”
― Daniel J. Siegel

“And it seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There is such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no casual connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles