Welcome to our collection of insightful quotes on adolescence. Adolescence is a period of transition marked by profound physical, emotional, and psychological changes. It’s a phase where individuals navigate through identity formation, peer relationships, and the pursuit of independence. This journey from childhood to adulthood is often tumultuous yet transformative, shaping individuals into the adults they will become. Through the lens of various thinkers, writers, and psychologists, we explore the complexities and nuances of this pivotal stage of human development.
In the words of renowned psychologists, authors, and notable figures, we uncover the essence of adolescence the struggles, the triumphs, the confusion, and the clarity. These quotes offer perspectives on everything from the challenges of self-discovery to the joys of newfound autonomy. Whether you’re experiencing adolescence firsthand, guiding someone through it, or simply reflecting on your own past, these quotes serve as poignant reminders of the universal truths and unique experiences that define this phase of life. Discover insights, inspiration, and understanding as we delve into the world of adolescence through the words of those who have traversed its terrain before.
Acting engenders and harbours qualities that are best left way behind in adolescence. Carrie Fisher
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. Ron Taffel
I’m quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I’ve been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera. Winona Ryder
I always loved acting, but when you get older and you’re going through adolescence, the roles are limited. Jonathan Ke Quan
A large part of my adolescence was spent doing my very best to draw attention to myself. Rufus Sewell
I picture Generation X as young adults living in a state of perpetual adolescence. Chris Eigeman
Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood. Louise J. Kaplan
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. Nora Ephron
Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough. Earl Wilson
I spent my whole adolescence, when you just want to be accepted, looking much younger than everyone else. Jenna Fischer
My father worked for the Foreign Office, so he was away a lot of the time. We were a very volatile family. There was a lot of love and a lot of conflict. The conflict kicked in mostly during my adolescence. Amanda Donohoe
My entire adolescence was geared toward one thing: gymnastics. Kerri Strug
Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice. David Elkind
Having children truly ends adolescence. We are all either parents or children: responsibility-takers or those who demand from others. Ben Shapiro
I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence. Robert Cormier
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. Ian Mcewan
I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn’t want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with. Maya Lin
I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off. Harold Brodkey
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. Louise J. Kaplan
The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference. Maria Montessori
I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head. Jeffrey Eugenides
The early adolescence years are crucial for a child’s cognitive, emotional and social development. Patty Mills
I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience – I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there’s this musical eclecticism that happened. Grimes
Female adolescence is – universally – an emotionally and psychologically intense period. Caitlin Flanagan
I’d say I’m drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It’s been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet. Ezra Miller
I did not have the moments of so-called normal people during adolescence, like going out with friends, enjoying good times. Kylian Mbappe
The idols of one’s adolescence tend to endure – you never forget how you worshipped them. Molly Ivins
Before adolescence I had an incredible voice. Like when I was 12, 13, 14 – I was taking acting classes, I was painting, I was making music, I was taking photographs. I was kind of exploding creatively, and then something about adolescence really just ground that out of me. Lynn Shelton
All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Octavio Paz
Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past. G. Stanley Hall
Based on my own experience, when you’re going through adolescence you don’t know how the world works. You can’t set a story in the world you live in because you don’t know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck. Patton Oswalt
Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are. John Grogan
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
Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It’s the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer. Ned Vizzini
I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies. Stanislav Grof
‘Great Expectations’ was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write. John Irving
Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence. Jesse Williams
I wouldn’t say I’m stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years. Sara Zarr
Adolescence isn’t just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses. Jena Malone
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. Alice Englert
I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird. Uma Thurman
I think every teenager goes through their angst. People who are like, ‘No, I had a perfect adolescence,’ make me wonder how that is possible. Shailene Woodley
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. Michael Leunig
Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap. Benedict Cumberbatch
What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence. Martha Beck
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. Laurie Halse Anderson
Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts. Mary Pipher
I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties. Pedro Almodovar
I may not have gone to high school every day, but I spent whole a lot of my adolescence feeling vulnerable and confused and alone… just like everybody else. Michael Cera
Just because I do what I do doesn’t mean I escaped adolescence, all the bumps and bruises that go along with it. Anna Paquin
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. Julian Barnes
When you are 8 or 9, you should have a childhood. You should have adolescence. You should go through everything in a normal way. Itzhak Perlman
Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion. Louise J. Kaplan
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. Gus Van Sant
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. J. G. Ballard
I feel like I flunked at adolescence really badly. I found it really difficult. Kate Beckinsale
I was never a big fashion person, and so I’m sure I wore whatever. I was growing, and so I just wore whatever clothes that weren’t that expensive and made sense at the time. But I’m sure that I look back and say, ‘What was I thinking?’ My adolescence was more in the ’80s, and that’s more my cross to bear. Vince Vaughn
Adolescence is a plague on the senses. Henry Rollins
I don’t believe in professional dissidents. I think it’s just a phase, like adolescence. Aung San Suu Kyi
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. John Ciardi
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. Jeffrey Kluger
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. Eddie Vedder
I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity. Tom Lehrer
Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. G. Stanley Hall
I’ve always tried to honour my dad and what he did for Yorkshire, which for him frequently meant putting the county’s cause before his own. But my late boyhood, my early teens and my adolescence were full of net sessions and practice drills he never witnessed, ups and downs he never knew about and matches he never saw. Jonny Bairstow
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London. Peter Shaffer
The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess. Meg Rosoff
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. Jose Ortega y Gasset
Being stuck in adolescence – that’s a hell. ‘Peter Pan’ is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be. Ben Sasse
You can certainly extend your adolescence. There’s people that are very good at extending it indefinitely. Ben Mendelsohn
Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways. Tayari Jones
Being a father can ‘unreason’ your worldview, or at least make it very flexible, and that can create all sorts of fun and insights. It’s sad that children’s open-eyed wonder and sense of play begin to fade as they approach adolescence. One grand function of fathering is to keep the fading to a minimum. Clyde Edgerton
One’s teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us. Jeremy Paxman
Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. Jose Saramago
The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence. Amity Shlaes
I designed ‘Buffy’ to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can’t be loved. Because it’s about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult. Joss Whedon
As my children leave the protected parameters of the bay called childhood and enter the wavier seas of adolescence, I’m starting to get seasick. Kristin Armstrong
I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying. Geraldine Brooks
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. Joe Baca
We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life. Gordon W. Allport
I spent a lot of my adolescence in Miami, where it was super humid, and my hair would get super frizzy, and my waves weren’t really consistent or pretty. Camila Mendes
I went through an awkward adolescence and had braces. Christina Ricci
The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence. Art Linkletter
I was always the young guy. And when you’re successful when you’re young, it leads to an arrested adolescence or something, y’know. Jim Carroll
Criticism starts – it has to start – with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. Harold Bloom
It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood. Chris Van Hollen
Life flies by, and it’s easy to get lost in the blur. In adolescence, it’s ‘How do I fit in?’ In your 20s, it’s ‘What do I want to do?’ In your 30s, ‘Is this what I’m meant to do?’ I think the trick is living the questions. Not worrying so much about what’s ahead but rather sitting in the grey area – being OK with where you are. Chris Pine
I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies’ man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn’t like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential ‘God, I exist, and nobody cares’ of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me. Joss Whedon
In part because of my own journey from a council estate in East London to a seat in the House of Commons, and in part because my adolescence took place during an economic boom and the advent of new technology, I had assumed that over time we would all become better off and, as the white wristbands told us, we would ‘Make Poverty History.’ Wes Streeting
My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife. Rita Levi-Montalcini
Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer. Deborah Bull
When you have little girls, you’re the coolest person in the world. I know at some point that’s going to end; in their adolescence I’ll become the opposite of that, especially if I’m parked outside a high school party. Jerry O’Connell
I sort of found King Diamond in second grade, but I didn’t become a devoted Satanist until a few years later, but that was very much part of my adolescence as well. Tobias Forge
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions. John Berger
When you share something about your adolescence, it’s a way to roll over and show your soft underbelly when it comes to talking about your past and the person that you once were. Janet Varney
Adolescence is society’s permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility. Terri Apter
As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind. Bernard Sumner
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. Harry Mathews
I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents. Suzanne Collins
When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence. Bruce Feiler
