Mara Wilson Quotes

I went through puberty really early, when I was 11. It makes you feel weird - you know, like your uncle is now hugging you a little bit longer than he used to. I think we all go through wanting to go back - you're not sure you're ready for that body.

Puberty was definitely difficult for me.

I went through puberty in a theme park. I'm grateful. That place was a landscape to me. I had adventures every day.

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

I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.

I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.

Going through puberty as a young girl is so confusing. This monster invades your body, changes things and makes things grow, and no one tells you what's going on.

I always had a hard time communicating my emotions. I'd retreat into my bedroom and listen to music. And when you're a teenager, you're dealing with all these hormones. It's like, 'What are these?'

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

Mad World' hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on.

Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do

When you're teenager, your hormones and your emotions are so tumultuous and so unpredictable. You're just trying to understand yourself.

Adolescence is like cactus.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

I basically had the same body when I was 14 and that was weird. But I think I had really good parents. I got really lucky.

Yeah, we were looking for a way to represent adulthood and the passing into adulthood. And I think, for me personally and a lot of the folks that I work with, childhood is kind of a sacred, special kind of point in time that has a real joy and purity to it. And we sort of long on a daily basis to reach back and kind of grab onto that in some way.

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.

It seems that one moment I was this little kid only caring about animals and flowers and stuff, and then the next minute I was this raging stew of hormones. I don't know if you've ever been a raging stew of anything, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it.

When you're breastfeeding a child, you don't have the same retention as you do when you're not.

The first film I remember seeing was Bambi. It has stayed with me because it was so sad.

You'd think after thousands of years on this planet the human race would have released some kind of handbook for teenagers, telling them how to get through teenagehood and get help for their issues. Yet here we are, struggling through it in our own ways.

I am back in LA now. And I keep thinking back to my time in New York after the bombings.... I was crying so much I could not see, and the other diners joined in, and I thought, What do you do with such atheistic evil?

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.

First you will smile, and then you will cry -- don't say you haven't been warned.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.