177 quotes found
“Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. Wh...”
“From my window I watched the full moona moon that reminded me of Brettbecome shadowed, little by little until there was only a deep blackness in the woods at night. I would sit there wakeful, hour ...”
“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 Elizabe...”
“The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desire...”
“For the first time in my life, I actually wished that everyone was the same. And I despised myself for my "differentness" or "uniqueness" as an individual. In the world there are lots of social gro...”
“Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.”
“One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identitynot necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which ...”
“Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.”
“For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in ...”
“Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. Th...”
“Bailey took an exasperated breath and sat up in the seat. You cant reason with a teenage girl.Elises eyebrow shot up. Bailey, youre a teenage girl.Exactly.”
“Stop looking at what everyone else has! You have to figure out who you are before you can be anyone!”
“What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for so...”
“So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”
“They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, ...”
“Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything ...”
“Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.”
“People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a fu...”
“When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.”
“I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.”
