Sarah Addison Allen Quotes

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

Early youth is a baffling time.

It's [high school] an interesting time in your life because you're trying to act older and mature but you really have no idea what you're doing. You're scared and it's okay to be scared. It's okay to not know completely what you want or what you should be doing and to stumble a little bit.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

One doesn't remain a teenager forever.

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.

You don't know who you are when you're 14.

I'm, like, finishing up high school. I don't know how you can learn anything from me because I'm still, like, a teenager. I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

They keep coming up new all the time - things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there's another right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you're beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what's right. It's a serious thing to grow up, isn't it, Marilla?

I'm eighteen, and I don't know what I want.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.

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

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

A flapper is just a little girl trying to grow up - in the process of growing up.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

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.

You are graduating from college. That means that this is the first day of the last day of your life. No, that's wrong. This is the last day of the first day of school. Nope, that's worse. This is a day.

You can't be 16 forever.

Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult's perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story - that part of a young person's life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it's like to be twelve years old.

Change brings opportunities. On the other hand, change can be confusing.