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.

Make no mistake adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.

Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Adolescence is a new birth for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

Adolescence isn't just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses.

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.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

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

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

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.