#adolescence

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever ↗

— Megan Abbott

#bravery #friendship #stength #friendship

We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us. ↗

— Natalia Ginzburg

#intelligence

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts. ↗

— Mary Pipher

#adolescence #aside #authentic #display #experience

Adolescence is the same tragedy being performed again and again. The only things that change are the stage props. ↗

— Lindsey Leavitt

#life #wisdom #change

It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#youth #life

All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged." "Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#adolescent-angst #teenaged-angst #family

So you love me," said Petra softly when the kiss ended. I'm a raging mass of hormones thet I'm too young to understand," said Bean. "You're a female of a closely related species. According to all the best primatologists, I really have no choice." That's nice," she said... ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#humor #love #humor

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#fantasy #feminism #sex #sexuality #beauty

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#age #change #chief #early #enforce

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer. ↗

— Deborah Bull

#dancer #dancers #just #lives #mind