It isn't what a teenager knows that worries his
parents. It's how he found out.~Ann Landers (1918-2002)

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another~Quentin Crisp

Adolescence is perhaps nature's way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest.~Karen Savage and Patricia Adams, The Good Stepmother

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.~Fran Lebowitz

Adolescence: A stage between infancy and adultery.~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Mother Nature is providential. She gives us twelve years to develop a love for our children before turning them into teenagers.~William Galvin

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.~Doug Larson

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



Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
― C.S. Lewis



All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle



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