Adolescence is supposed to be an identity Schrodinger's Cat: multiple simultaneous states which eventually collapse into only one. The goal of adulthood is to let go of the other possible existences and to make the best of the one. A successful adult is one who understands that it doesn't matter which life you ultimately pick, only that you live it well.

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

Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing--while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy--but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied.

If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair basically a chore. Buy mother a book dad a new tie my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

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

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

Well I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.

Even as kids reach adolescence they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very very involved and interested in art and particularly in animated movies.

There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an adolescent. The moodiness the volatility the wholesale lack of impulse control all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence they're just part of the behavioral portfolio.

When I was 14 I felt very rundown I had a home to go to but I felt like I was 60 or something older than I feel now. And I don't know if it's something that happens at 14 or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay or closeted gay or whatever it was I felt that.

With any child entering adolescence one hunts for signs of health is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally my body was changing my mind was changing and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given is our society. Your education and your mother and father they tell you this is how it is but then you hit adolescence and you think 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

Head Start graduates are more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to need special education repeat a grade or commit crimes in adolescence.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

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.