Noelle Stevenson Quotes

When you're that age - that middle-school age, early high school - you're changing. You're going crazy. So I put all of my energy into pretending I was someone else, battling and screaming and all that stuff - casting spells and getting into a whole fantasy world. It was really healthy for me.

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

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

I'm a young woman, and I'm growing up and trying to do it in a way I feel comfortable with.

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

'The Darkest Minds' came from a period in my life where I felt my most powerless, when I was a teenager.

When I went into the conservatory at 17, then I was able to open up and accept everything about myself and show my feminine side as well as my masculine.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

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.

People define themselves aesthetically at a very young age.

I didn't figure out the makeup or cute hair or clothes until oh, maybe my junior year of high school.

Teenagers are asking, 'Who am I?' and 'How do I fit in?' in every aspect of their lives, and the best YA romances appreciate that there is more to a teen's life than finding love.

I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

No matter where you are or where you grow up, you always go through the same awkward moments of being a teenager and growing up and trying to figure out who you are.

Every teenager and everybody around the ages from 10 to 18 has to go through finding out who they are.

The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.

For me, 'Rent' was all about coming out of myself, finding out who I was, learning the power I could have as a performer. And 'Wicked' was about harnessing all that strength.

When I first got into the entertainment industry, I would always watch Rihanna and all those people, so I was like, 'Ooh, I have to be this.' So my mom was like, 'Just be yourself.'

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

I think obviously there's a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s .

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.