Louise J. Kaplan Quotes

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

When I was younger, I went through a lot of different phases. One day I'd be punk rock, and the next I would be tomboyish, and then I would be really girly. I was so weird. My two best friends and I were just crazy and goofy!

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

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.

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

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

By the time I was 16, I was someone to reckon with. I was so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race, I would go above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my drive as a teenager.

Teens are strange and magical.

Every teenager feels like a freak. It's part of being a teenager, part of the individuation from child to adult - those teenage years are who am I? What am I? Where am I going?

Adolescence is like cactus.

At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive. At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing and assertive. At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

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

Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.

Adolescence isn't a period; it's a coma.

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.

Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing.

An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

Teenagers are people too!

Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.

It comes with being sixteen," Mom said. "You teenagers, you go into a cocoon when you turn fifteen and don't come out for years." "So they become butterflies when they finally come out?" my little sister Christina asked. "No," Mom said. "They're still caterpillars, only now they're big fat caterpillars that smell.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.