Nellie McKay Quotes

On her daughter: And she's going through all these changes. You know, it's just crazy times.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

Adolescence is like cactus.

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

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

I basically had the same body when I was 14 and that was weird. But I think I had really good parents. I got really lucky.

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.

Negotiating the adolescent stage is neither quick nor easy.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years... I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up.

You know, I think that we are going to be OK. Look, Malia is 10, so three years from now she is 13. Who knows what happens to teenagers?

By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded.

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.

If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.

Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.

Just being young and growing up in this business is hard. Just growing up in general is hard.

Parenting a pre-teen is quite something.

If I can help get anybody through puberty, I say, 'Good!'

This is the time it all starts, I'm telling you. Like, 16, I mean, forget it. You could just get beat up, you could go through these grueling schedules.

I thought it was such a unique concept to play parents who happen to be super heroes and have a son who is going through puberty and starting high school.

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