Lucy Dacus 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.

Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life's little horrors begin.

I am stuck at 10 years old. I think.

There's something incredibly vulnerable about middle school for me. We're really impressionable during that period. The cement's still wet, so to speak, and a lot of things later in life are born during that season.

When you're 12, you have no gauge for what's hip or not hip - or even who you are.

I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

'Middle school' is used as shorthand for a time when things change. It's a time a lot of kids feel like they don't even have one good friend.

I really never thought about the way I looked until boys came into the picture.

I was raised with adults. I skipped knowing how to interact as a normal teenage person.

High school is just horrible in general. So, I think it was a good time for me to have stopped acting. I got to be normal in high school.

I think you go through a period as a teenager of being quite cool and unaffected by things.

I kept a journal when I was a teenager, so I definitely look back on those to see how I dealt with friends and cliques and getting picked on, or boyfriend breakups.

I had a nickname in junior high, and I'm loathe to say this: 'potato lady.'

I didn't date for my entire teen life - it just wasn't on my mind.

I stopped going to school in the middle of fourth grade. Everyone grows up with the peer pressure, and kids being mean to each other in school. I think that's such a horrible thing, but I never really dealt with it in a high school way.

I think high school's very difficult. You're figuring out your own power and your effect on other people. You look back and see how you spent so much energy on figuring out things with your parents or your peers.

Where I come from, you don't really dance, you know. I think I was at the age, where, I suppose, I wanted to do what all me friends were doing. I gave up dancing for a while, and then I realised I wasn't as good at football as I thought I was.

As teenagers, we all see ourselves as outsiders... and it's very easy to look at other people who are more popular, who have more pocket money, and it makes you feel even more like an outsider, and it does shape who you become as a person.

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.

I don't think anyone can get away from high school unscathed.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.