We have to acknowledge that adolescence is that time of transition where we begin to introduce to children that life isn't pretty, that there are difficult things, there are hard situations, it's not fair. Bad things happen to good people.

I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things - genre paintings, historical paintings - the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.

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.

Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.

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.

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.

Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.

We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body.

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.

For a long time in my adolescence, comedy was the only tool I had for communication and dealing with the world and dealing with people - I didn't know any other lens in which to do it.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We're talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

"But I think there's something inside of us, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves...and it's just...*want*. [...]