Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

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

Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero.

Everybody knows it hurts to grow up... and we're still fighting it.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

Everybody remembers what it's like to be in high school. We really never leave those years behind.

When you're in high school, you can't even imagine the concept of what the rest of your life even means.

When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.

I really like coming-of-age dramas. It's probably the most intense period in anyone's life, those years before you become an adult. Dramatically, there's so much to explore there. And it's nice to be around young talent coming through.

I just wanted to do something about the teenage experience; it's such a wonderful and horrible time of life.

I think when you're in your 20s, going from adolescence to about 24, I think your life is a series of emotional storms that you have to weather. Life is more emotional at that time, and you're less equipped to deal with what life throws at you. I always think that if you can get past 24, than life really starts at that point.

I enjoyed being a teenager.

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.

I'm still in the middle of the transition. I'm still in man-boy mode. And that won't go away for a while. But it's a fun time to be in, because it's very rare that people get to work through this time. It's rare to see a John Cusack in Say Anything. It's rare that you'd find an actor right in the cusp of the child-to adult transition, just got through puberty, just getting into a different way of life. There's few movies like that, and few roles like that, so it's going to be tough to pick and choose. I guess the goal is good people, work with good people.

Other people have suggested that I write about teens because I'm perpetually stuck in that stage of my own development. That could very well be true. I would throw out that teens and tweens are just absolutely fabulous and the most interesting people on the planet. And it is a time of high drama, and everything matters.

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.

High school is a really strange time - you're not a kid, you're not an adult. You're about to be an adult, you're going to have to make some really intense decisions. It's a really pivotal time to have as much self-confidence as you possibly can. Even if that means you have one friend who supports you completely.

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

I am going to give you a piece of advice... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worry—loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact—loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.

Talk about high school and what we identify with in the play; things that have happened to us and all of our high school experiences that we could bring to this. And to talk about what everyone knows in each specific scene.

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.

And you're figuring out who you are, and you haven't yet become stagnant in your thinking. You haven't solidified. And one thing that I find is that a lot of grown-ups tend to look back on their high school or middle school years and say, "Oh, thank God all that's over."

Baby, high school's over. High school's never over.

School, in general, was not great. Children are just mean to each other... but by high school, I probably stopped being annoying to people, and people stopped being mean. By the end of it, it was wonderful.

When you're living through it, though, especially when you are twelve and you think the whole world is changing until you realize it isn't the world, it's you, no piece seems little. It's all so big you think it can kill you. But it doesn't. Which is why the story goes on.

...I'm thirteen years old, and I think I'm at the crossroads of my life. I've got to make good between now and the time I'm twenty, and I have only seven years to do it in. Besides, I'm the father of my family and I've got to earn all the money I can.