Judith Viorst Quotes

Going through puberty as a young girl is so confusing. This monster invades your body, changes things and makes things grow, and no one tells you what's going on.

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.

When you're teenager, your hormones and your emotions are so tumultuous and so unpredictable. You're just trying to understand yourself.

Adolescence is like cactus.

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 is that time when I think, it can be- it's the cruelest place on Earth. It can really be heartless.

I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.

When I was going through puberty, I had all these feelings of being unstable through those years, and being uncontrollably drawn to things of beauty and things that are bad.

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

I just wanted to do something about the teenage experience; it's such a wonderful and horrible time of life.

When you're an adolescent, you suddenly wake up one morning and your body is an enemy. There are hormonal changes, physical changes, emotional changes. People are saying to you, 'Now you have to make the decisions that define the rest of your life.' The X-Men takes those elements and pushes them one giant step farther.

Midlife is a time of explosive change, particularly for women. It's just like experiencing another puberty. The changes that take place in your body are enormous and, like puberty, you have to throw off the past.

Puberty was definitely difficult for me.

High school is a pit of despair. It's a swirling tornado of insecurities and there's really nothing good about it. It's at the time where everybody is waking up with different opinions every day, and you're on this learning curve of who you are and who you want to be, and you're comparing yourself with every other male and female around you. There's no sense to it.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

If you think back to your time as a teenager, everything was dramatic.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

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.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

Adolescence is a plague on the senses.

I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.

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

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.

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.