Jessica Alba Quotes

Eventually your boobs grow and you can't run anymore, and that was a really rude awakening.

Obviously from 12-years-old to 16-years-old, your body changes and that's nothing to be embarrassed about, but boy I was!

When it comes to age, I just feel like puberty is, like, the most horrible time of anyone's life.

I was just a lanky kid, just tall.

I remember putting mascara on when I was 13 for the first time and going to the shop to buy a chocolate bar. I felt so exposed. I remember wearing a bra for the first time and feeling very exposed by that.

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.

Growing up as a girl is always traumatizing, especially when you have the deadly combination of greasy skin and getting your boobs at ten. But I think it's good to grow up that way. It builds character.

My eleven year old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her breasts to grow.

Early on, girls begin to menstruate, which is dramatic but not obvious to their playmates. They grow taller and rounder, but underneath their makeup they are still recognizably themselves. For boys it is far more disorienting. Puberty comes later, sometimes much later, and its delay is humiliating. While the tall round girls are getting themselves up like grown women, the prepubertal boys, with their featureless, hairless bodies, are just dirty little kids who could pass for the children of the hypermature girls.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

When I was about 13 I realised girls weren't going to kiss me because I was a gigantic, weird looking creature from the depths. I was like 6 ft. aged 11.

Everyone seems to relate to the awkwardness of being a teenager, or even a 30-year-old.

No matter when you were born or where, puberty is the same. It's the same for your parents as it is for you - what's happening in your body dictates everything.

I completely remember the horror I felt when my pits started getting hairy. I would walk with my arms pressed against my sides.

Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.

In school, I was a beanpole with a nose I hadn't grown into.

Puberty is an extremely traumatic process even if you don't realize it. It kind of lives with you for like 10 years.

If you are a skinny, baby-faced teenager, the last thing you want to hear is that you're cute.

If you asked me to go back to being 14 or 15, I couldn't - it was a terrifying time. I was so awkward in my own skin. I used to hide behind my hair because I was so ridiculously self-conscious.

I was 5' 10 when I was 14, skinny and flat, with huge feet, and I never had a boyfriend.

I was wildly interested in puberty as a child.

I was a bit of a late developer, and everyone was saying, 'Whatever you do, don't shave,' and I hadn't really started shaving. I remember rubbing the soot from a kettle on to my bumfluff to make it look more like I had a beard.

I'm growing into my manhood body.

I was a girl with freckles and grew into a young woman a little bit more quickly, with hips and thighs.

Looking at me now, it might be hard to believe that I didn't even have hair in my armpits when I graduated from high school. I guarantee you I was the last guy to go through puberty in my class.