Milo Ventimiglia Quotes

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

Fifteen is such a weird age to be. Nobody treats you like an adult, but you desperately want to be one. You still have these childlike aspects, but you're just kind of coming into the world.

You don't know who you are when you're 14.

When I did 'Fast Times,' I felt very close emotionally to the characters. I liked those characters because they all had to work, so they were dealing with adult problems even though they were very immature, and I could relate to that.

We're naturally programmed to endure a muddle of emotions as we leave childhood behind.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult's perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story - that part of a young person's life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it's like to be twelve years old.

I think when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful.

I grew up very fast as a young girl, but I grew slowly into my womanhood.

I think the child I was until 12 was so much more interesting than the teenager I became.

I think in the experience of growing up and realizing who you are, what your place in the world is can be quite scary.

It's tough to be 12. You're not quite a man, but you think you are.

It's very bizarre to me to now really be a grown-up. I kind of can't believe that I'm there because I certainly don't feel that way a lot of the time.

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.

There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.

Coming-of-age stories in high school are exciting because everything that happens during that time is very heightened.

They keep coming up new all the time - things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there's another right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you're beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what's right. It's a serious thing to grow up, isn't it, Marilla?

I actually didn't enjoy being a child particularly at all even though I had nice parents in a comfortable place to live. Just because I was too confused in generating too many answers for myself that just scared me more.

I get a little scared of words like maturity.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.