Evan Esar Quotes

Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.

Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven’t gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing.

I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you're not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.

And I like asking questions, to keep learning; people with big egos might not want to look unsure.

I suppose I've always lived in my own head. I didn't discover boys till sixth form. Then suddenly it was, 'Oh! Boys!'

I am sure that adolescents find it just as confusing and difficult to understand themselves as their elders find them difficult to understand.

That's the great thing about being a teenager. You think you're a genius.

I'm gonna be the best version of me. If there's something I don't know, I'm not afraid to ask.

And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.

Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.

Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

You know more than you think you do.

I wish my 15-year-old self had known about my allure to the opposite sex!

I'm always thinking about identity. And the middle-school years are a time of exploring questions about who you are and who you want to be. For the first time, you see the world in a broader sense.

There is no such thing as an unreasonable question, or a silly question, or a frivolous question, or a waste-of-time question. It's your life, and you've got to get these answers.

By the second time I sang by myself in school, I just realized that I was more in control of my environment than I had ever been before.

I didn't figure out the makeup or cute hair or clothes until oh, maybe my junior year of high school.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

I always imagined that magically, at some point, I would settle into this very easy and refined sophistication, but it turns out that who you are at eleven is pretty much who you are at 27, so I don't know how much I've learned over the years.

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.