To be young is all there is in the world. . . . [Adults] talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. . . . Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds. —Wallace Stevens More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops? —Nick Hornby More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I have no contempt for that time of life when our friendships are most passionate and our passions incorrigible and none of our sentiments yet compromised by greed or cowardice or disappointment. The volatility and intensity of adolescence are qualities we should aspire to preserve. —Edmund White More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy. —Jessamyn West More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off; when I'm silent they think I'm ridiculous; rude if I answer, sly if I get a good idea, lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I eat a mouthful more than I should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc., etc. —Anne Frank, age thirteen More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else — but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence. —Annie Dillard More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth — that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable? —Vera Brittain More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The difficulty between parents and adolescents is not always caused by the fact that parents fail to remember what growing up was like, but that they do. —Marcelene Cox More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Adolescence is a modern invention, a time before the onset of responsibility. During this moratorium the not-yet-adult is allowed to rebel, to play, and to experiment. In primitive cultures the son was cast in the same mold as the father. The sacred ways of the ancestors were repeated without alteration. —Sam Keen More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another. —Quentin Crisp More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath. —Arnold H. Glasow More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain upon me. —Rahel Varnhagen More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. —Alan Watts More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it. —Harry Emerson Fosdick More about this quote Tags: peace pouncing reactivity Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
One way to slow down and begin to change our perspective is to begin to measure our lives by each breath we take, rather than by each day, month, or year. . . . It won't make a better you or a worse you. But it will reveal you. —Angel Kyodo Williams More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email