Quotes about Adolescence

When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wrote in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandmas, not me.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty.

Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.

It wasn't easy. In junior high, I was voted "most polite," and it took some time for me to realize that being perceived as a "nice guy" and being a faithful Christian don't always go hand in hand.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Few, if any, survive their teens.

Peer pressure accounts for much of the promiscuous sex in high schools and colleges. "Conform or get lost." Since no one enjoys losing friends or being cast out of his own circle, peer pressure—especially during the years of adolescence—is an almost irresistible force.

In earlier periods of history, adolescence was virtually unknown... Today, the span between childhood and adulthood may extend over ten years. Deferred adulthood is synonymous with deferred responsibility.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.