Rebecca Stead Quotes

I'm always thinking about identity. And the middle-school years are a time of exploring questions about who you are and who you want to be. For the first time, you see the world in a broader sense.

My memories of being nine or ten years old are especially vivid, since this is the time when you have a real sense of who you are - before the self-conscious preteen years start.

I suppose I've always lived in my own head. I didn't discover boys till sixth form. Then suddenly it was, 'Oh! Boys!'

I feel like we're always learning about ourselves, but at twelve, you're learning big things that shape your identity.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.

In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently.

I think I've been lucky enough to have had an extended adolescence. I'm a lot like I was when I was 15.

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.

Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It's the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer.

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

Watching kids go from the age of 9 and 10 to 13 is a big, huge jump. The way they speak, their looks, their attitudes, everything changes as you go from being a little kid to a teenager.

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics.

I think that as a young lady, you start off not knowing what you want to do, and then you kinda arrive at yourself by the time you're 17 or 18, hopefully. And that's what I did.

I think there is a point in every teenager's life where they are forced to come into themselves.

Everything when you're a teenager is a projection. Or at least, for me, it was. 'Who am I gonna be?'

My high school experience - and I think a lot of people feel this way - was complicated and intense, and I learned a lot about female relationships during that time.

I think that until we're 21, human beings don't get to know themselves very much.

I think I am attracted to that time in life when your worldview is still forming in small ways.

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

It was only when I got to 21 that my personality started coming out a little bit more.