David Gerrold Quotes

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

Adolescence is like cactus.

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

I was approaching adolescence. For some reason, I guess my mother thought it would be less crazy out in the suburbs, which it wasn't. I just think adolescence is hard for anyone.

And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.

I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that’s no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you’re 14, you’re basically on drugs all the time - the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you’re experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn’t have to do with you and you’re just some dummy boy for me to project on.

I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.

I don't really know exactly how it happened but I don't like the idea that I would ever have said I'm going to write about racism or puberty or bullying.

Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.

In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys' bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.

I remember watching 21 Jump Street and thinking I'm attracted to Johnny Depp - "What are these feelings?" I remember all of this, the first time you feel things. I mean, yes, boys in class, whatever, but to specifically go back to those experiences, it's kind of amazing.

The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.

I had learned how it felt to want more than the sweet touch of hand to cheek or lips to palm, more than a kiss, more than an embrace. I was starting to discover that it is not only the mind that understands love, but also the body.

When you're a teenager, you don't want to bring your emotions to the surface and talk about them. You want to push them away.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

I think everyone has their awkward phases. Growing up isn't easy for everyone.

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

I was probably not the first to lose my virginity among my friends. I was definitely one of the last ones to reach puberty - I didn't grow until the last couple years of high school.

A small olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend.

From that day on, it was the desert that would be important. She would look to it everyday, and would try to guess which star the boy was following in search of his treasure. She would have to send her kisses on the wind hoping that the wind would touch the boy's face, and would tell him that she was alive.

Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he leaned in to kiss her, she gave herself over to him. While he held her close, she ran her hands over his shoulders and back, feeling the strength in his arms. She knew he’d wanted more in their relationship than she’d been willing to offer, but here and now, she suddenly knew she had no other choice. There was only this moment, and it was theirs.

Anybody who's gone through puberty has understood what it feels like to be an outcast and alone.

Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.