Francine Prose Quotes

Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers?

I was a happy kid up until I hit the teen years.

The area of teenage life is not necessarily rarefied; we've all gone through that period. It's not as rarefied as a western or a space adventure or a gangster film, but it has its own dynamic.

You're breaking up, you're getting together, you're changing your life, you're arguing with your parents, you're making terrible mistakes, you're having great triumphs. It's what happens to teenagers.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

In a lot of ways, I wasn't a normal teenager.

Oakland Technical High School. Like any high-school experience, it was ambiguous. I was shy with girls; I had friends, but there were times I didn't feel I had the right friends. My grades were only so-so.

I didn't feel so great when I was a teenager, but who does?

I feel like I flunked at adolescence really badly. I found it really difficult.

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

I remember the kind of teenager I was, the kind of teenager I wanted to be, and then the kind of teenagers that were all around me. Life is lived on such a big scale in those years - and such an embarrassing one as well.

Being young is so hard. You're surrounded by judgment and fear.

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.

'Welcome to the Dollhouse' is great. Even though it's about a girl in middle school, to me, that feels like the most honest reflection of what being a kid around that age feels like.

It's tough to be 12. You're not quite a man, but you think you are.

No one escapes the teenage years without a lot of challenges. I had many. I was awkward. Petrified of boys.

I've played a lot of teenagers and I think sometimes they tend to make them a bit too mushy, because you're not actually connected to yourself at all really when you're a teenager.

A lot of shows and movies that have tried to represent teenagers or the chaos that is coming at that age, they shy away from it, romanticize it, or they kind of fantasize what it's like to be a teenager.

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.

When you're a teenager, a year can be crippling to maneuver through. Some things happen when you're like 13. All of a sudden you go from being this really confident, no-worry little kid to having all these weird insecurities for no reason.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.

To me, White Boy Shuffle is sort of like Catcher in the Rye, the story is so universal.

Sixteen is a hard time. A lot of kids are experimenting with things.

Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it's like to be 12 years old.