Jenny Downham Quotes

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

When you come out of your teens, you think you're sussed. But you don't know who you are at 22. You're constantly trying to fit in. You get a little lost.

Early youth is a baffling time.

You can't be 16 forever.

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.

I hope no man takes what I said about the living and dieing of men for mathematical demonstration.

I was 24 yesterday. Suddenly you wake up, and you get on the elevator, and there's a mirror there. And you look in the mirror, and you're an old man.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

I think in the experience of growing up and realizing who you are, what your place in the world is can be quite scary.

I think, for many teens, a fundamental fact of the teenage experience is that you're in between this childlike state, in which you're told you're completely unqualified for just about anything in the adult world, and this adult world, where you're being told you have to be responsible, and you're just trying to figure out where you stand.

You can't be a 25-year-old forever.

Young, dumb, lookin' in the mirror tryin' to figure out who I’m gonna be this year.

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

I was listening to this Adele song, where she's like, "When we were young..." I was like, "You're 27. Are you kidding me?

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.

It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

I stood on a tower in the wet, And New Year and Old Year met, And winds were roaring and blowing: And I said, "O years, that meet in tears, Have ye aught that is worth the knowing? Science enough and exploring, Wanderers coming and going, Matter enough for deploring, But aught that is worth the knowing?

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing