Garrison Keillor Quotes

In my teenage years, there was a lot of angst going on.

Mad World' hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on.

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.

Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adult.

I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.

I think everybody had this weird mix of pubescent rage and sadness, and just pure mania and joy. It's a really weird time.

It seems that one moment I was this little kid only caring about animals and flowers and stuff, and then the next minute I was this raging stew of hormones. I don't know if you've ever been a raging stew of anything, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it.

Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

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.

Although I'm a retired teenager, I remember what it was like to be one. I could have sworn I was riding an emotional roller coaster most of the time. Looking back, I'm actually amazed that I survived. Barely.

There was a three-year chunk as a teen where I should have been tranquilized and put in a cage.

When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

I was an angry kid.

When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.

I think all teenagers feel alone, and that nobody else knows what they are going through and all that sort of stuff.

Adolescence is a plague on the senses.

Puberty is an extremely traumatic process even if you don't realize it. It kind of lives with you for like 10 years.

As an adolescent, I was bitter and angry, and I definitely put up these walls.

I always had a hard time communicating my emotions. I'd retreat into my bedroom and listen to music. And when you're a teenager, you're dealing with all these hormones. It's like, 'What are these?'

When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.

I was an unhappy teenager, and there's just no way around it.