Adolescence Quotes

Adolescence is perhaps nature's way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest.

parenting teenage

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

poetry

You have a wonderful child. Then, when he's thirteen, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment's peace.

Many a man wishes he were strong enough to tear a telephone book in half - especially if he has a teenage daughter.

father daughters

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

[Adolescence is the time] when the brisk minor pants for twenty-one.

Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth, 
When thought is speech, and speech is truth.

Definition of adolescence: A Kind of emotional seasickness.

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.

parenting growing up

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

parenting

She has her own apartment, in mine.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

poets

It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days.

reunion growing up

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.

When they reach the age of fifteen and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting—like coming into an inheritance.

beauty

Young children grow, but adolescents change—and change is confusing.  It confuses the sprouting adolescent to wake up every morning in a new body.  It confuses the mother and father to find a new child every day in a familiar body—a child contumelious of the things that yesterday's child wanted, a child with a different rhythm of living, a child who talks knowingly about things that yesterday's child never heard of.

Adolescence goes to at least the age of 49.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

Adolescence is the time when even the dullest clod knows that he possesses a soul and the genius that he lives in a perpetual adolescence.

I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times.  One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away.

It is a jesting universe where the longing for first romance couples with acne.

Mope—Hope—Grope.

All the best human impulses can be traced back to adolescence.

You have a wonderful child.  Then, when he's thirteen, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment's peace.  You have to hang in there, because two or three years later, the gremlins will return your child, and he will be wonderful again.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive.  At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing, and assertive.  At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure, and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

maturity

Adolescents often behave much like members of an old-fashioned aristocracy. They maintain private rituals, which they often do not really understand themselves. They are extremely conservative in their dress and tastes, but the conventions to which they adhere are purely those of their own social group; they try to ignore the norms of the larger society if these conflict with their own.

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it.  Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.

Adolescence is located in the foothills of Jackass Mountain.

The conveyer belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down.

Adolescence isn't a training ground for adulthood now; it is a holding pattern for aging youth.

Instinct told her that childhood's garden had been barred and there was no return. In some measure this simple truth is known to every adolescent.

Adolescence is the period of life when we first become obsessed with trying to prove we are not a child—an obsession that can last a lifetime.

We carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives.

The rich loam of adolescence—a time of constant crisis and ceaseless calamity—beckons writers to till and retill youthful memories; "just like a criminal; goes back to the place of his crime," said Isaac Beshevis Singer.

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness.  Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood.  Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.

It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their adolescence unsettled and desultory.

Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors.

O Adolescence, O Adolescence,
I wince before thine incandescence.
Thy constitution young and hearty
Is too much for this aged party.

Adolescence is like cactus.

The ripeness of adolescence is prodigal in pleasures, skittish, and in need of a bridle.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage-managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

The transformation into a werewolf in particular is a metaphor for adolescence and the sexual transformation of a child.

transformation

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.

The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

Adolescents are like cockroaches: They come out the minute you leave town, crawl the walls, feed indiscriminately, reproduce alarmingly unless drugged, and will certainly outlast you.

Parental trust is extremely important in the guidance of adolescent children as they get further and further away from the direct supervision of their parents and teachers.  I don't mean that trust without clear guidance is enough, but guidance without trust is worthless.

trust parenting

In no order of things is adolescence a time of the simple life.

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

musicians

Many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.

A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent if he acts normal.