Adolescents Quotes

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsly attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated.”
― Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light

“The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“A lot of people believe that mental illness does not affect our children within the school system. But the truth is that a lot of bullying stems from untreated or poorly treated mental and behavioral health problems.”
― Tamara Hill, MS, Mental Health In A Failed American System: What Every Parent, Family, & Caregiver Should Know

“Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“How many of us readers say this quote and mean it. "If I knew what I know now life would be different"....”
― Robert Reed

“We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about 'the texting generation' as if thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who couldn't boil an egg are capable of creating a culture. They grow on what we feed them. It has never been otherwise. The only thing that changes is the food.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.”
― Lily King, Five Tuesdays in Winter

“She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell - with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The most ignorant and wasted youthful generation is the very one that the older generation uses to create social conflicts to their own youthful detriment!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn't be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure. And in banning the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court had paid great attention to the emerging body of medical research about adolescent development and brain science and its relevance to juvenile crime and culpability.

Contemporary neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence has established that children are impaired by immature judgment, an underdeveloped capacity for self-regulation and responsibility, vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures, and a lack of control over their own impulses and their environment.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“A wide assortment of children's rights advocates, lawyers, and mental health experts were watching closely when we asked the Court to declare life-without-parole sentences imposed on children unconstitutional.

....I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children. I explained that condemning children violates international law, which bans these sentences for children. We showed the Court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that the phenomenon of life sentences imposed on children is largely a result of harsh punishments that were created for career adult criminals and were were never intended for children--which made the imposition of such a sentence on juveniles like Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan unusual. I also told the Court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Adolescents, malgré les données d’intelligence et de tempérament, nous sommes en grande partie fabriqués par notre éducation, notre milieu, nos parents ; adultes, nous nous fabriquons par nos choix.”
― Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

“Girls may be suffering more than boys [mental illnesses] because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“This Dr. Wilburforce was wonderful! He sounded as if he had had adolescent children. He said that adolescence was a difficult period but entirely normal and his sympathies were with the parents, not the adolescents. He said that there was entirely too much “understanding,” actually excusing of the adolescent, his lack of manners, selfishness, tantrums, and so on. He thought that the most intelligent approach to the problem was to understand that the adolescent, just by the nature of the beast, is going to chafe and rebel and he needs something specific to chafe and rebel against. Lay down strict rules of behavior and enforce them. Rebelling against nothing is very frustrating. Demand that the adolescent go along with the family routine. Do not allow him to keep the household in a continual uproar. …Instead of giving your child too much freedom, too much money, and all the responsibility for his actions, try giving him limited freedom and money, a strict code of behavior, and oceans and gallons and mountains of love. Not the deep-hidden-river I-bore-you-so-I-will-have-to-like-you type of love, but the visible, hug-and-kiss, lavish-compliment, interested-audience kind. Tell your adolescent he is brilliant, handsome, charming, witty, and lovable. Tell him every day. Tell him even when you are taking away the keys of the car and would like to kick him. Assure him and reassure him and re-reassure him. Love is the most important element in human relationships. You can never give a child too much love.”
― Betty MacDonald, Onions in the Stew

“His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness.”
― Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War

“This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.”
― Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

“It was at that moment that I called in a few of the top Fidgeters who, under my directions, set about organizing the destruction of the young. The method is quite straightforward; the children are taken at the time when their intelligence is not yet fully developed, and their passions respond to the slightest stimulation; they are made to live in companies, dressed and armed uniformly, and by means of magic speeches and collective physical exercises, whose secret is ours alone, we give them what we call "the cult of the common ideal"; this is an absolute devotion to a loud-mouthed, authoritarian person, or to a particular form of dress, or to some catch phrase, or to a certain grouping of colors, or whatever. All we need then is to have here two opposing groups of young people (or more than two, but an even number is preferable) who have been kept at a high level of emotional tension; the sole precaution to take is to leave no time for their brains to function, but that's easy enough. Then (are you with me?) when they have reached just the right pitch, they are let loose on one another...and afterwards, we can breathe easy for a while. This, at the same time, occupies and enriches the manufacturers and sellers of uniforms and armaments, and the authors of tracts which recommend the uses of carnage, one of whom wrote recently: "The young man who is not killed in the flower of youth is not a young man, he is the old man of tomorrow.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“Especialmente os adolescentes e os jovens, que sentem impelente a chamada do amor dentro de si, têm necessidade de ser libertados do preconceito difundido de que o cristianismo, com os seus mandamentos e as suas proibições, coloca demasiados obstáculos à alegria do amor, e sobretudo que impede que se aprecie plenamente aquela felicidade que o homem e a mulher encontram no seu amor recíproco. Pelo contrário, a fé e a ética cristãs não querem sufocar o amor, mas torná-lo sadio, forte e verdadeiramente livre: é precisamente este o sentido dos Dez Mandamentos, que não são uma série de "nãos", mas um grande "sim" ao amor e à vida.”
― Bento XVI

“...there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Adolescents' "heroic willingness" to fight one another in wars and (just as life is beginning!) to die for someone else's cause may be a result of the fact that during puberty the warded-off hatred from early childhood becomes really intensified. Adolescents can divert this hatred from their parents if they are given a clear-cut enemy whom they are permitted to hate freely and with impunity.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“I still feel that most F/SF is aimed at people who refuse to grow up. This is ironical because the proportion of genre readers who refuse to grow up has actually gone down a little since I made those criticisms. (I should remind people that I was by no means the first to make them.) What locks the field into juvenility these days is not writer/reader feedback: it's the intense determination of corporate publishers to maintain an audience of extended adolescents. People who don't grow up properly buy more things, especially hacky-slashy faery Game Boy virtual world-building sorts of things.”
― M. John Harrison