#adolescence

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures. ↗

— Sara Paretsky

#endurance #experience #inspirational #experience

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen. ↗

— Steven Millhauser

#suburbia #summer #dreams

No matter how good you are, at some point your kids are gonna have to create their own independence and think that Mom and Dad aren't cool, just to establish themselves. That's what adolescence is about. They're gonna go through that no matter what. ↗

— Eddie Vedder

#adolescence #cool #create #dad #establish

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion. ↗

— Louise J. Kaplan

#adolescence #after #capable #children #compassion

When you have little girls, you're the coolest person in the world. I know at some point that's going to end; in their adolescence I'll become the opposite of that, especially if I'm parked outside a high school party. ↗

— Jerry O'Connell

#become #coolest #end #especially #going

At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks. Then you grow up. ↗

— John Marsden

#age

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#childhood #coming-of-age #earthsea #age

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#complaints #humor #understanding #humor

And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that I'll have to hear Mary Elizabeth talk about all the great things she exposed me to all the time. I don't understand that. I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#culture #philosophy #love

It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#growing-up #love #parenthood #love