Mary E. Pearson Quotes

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.

As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.

I suppose I've always lived in my own head. I didn't discover boys till sixth form. Then suddenly it was, 'Oh! Boys!'

That's the thing that I've always kind of kept in the back of my head in writing about teens, that everything is so important, all the time, every day. Every day of your life, you're changing and making decisions and everything is an emergency to you.

I think that as a young lady, you start off not knowing what you want to do, and then you kinda arrive at yourself by the time you're 17 or 18, hopefully. And that's what I did.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

At midlife, I think a woman has more in common with her teenage children than anybody else. We all are kind of uncertain. We realize for the first time in either our lives or decades that we're in charge now.

By the time you're 18, 19, you know yourself, and you shouldn't go against your gut feeling, which is a temptation in the first year of university.

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

High school is just horrible in general. So, I think it was a good time for me to have stopped acting. I got to be normal in high school.

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'm just doing the best I can now to keep this going... trying to grow up and remain young at the same time.

I think I've been lucky enough to have had an extended adolescence. I'm a lot like I was when I was 15.

Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.

I tell people: 'Do what you love, but it can also be hard to know what you love early on. But when you think about it and you describe the options, which one gets you a little more excited?'

Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It's the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer.

I felt like high school for me was like a big whirlpool of me trying to figure out what was OK for me to do.

Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.

Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.

Everything I do today is because of what I did when I was 14.

'Catcher in the Rye' changed my life when I was a kid. I read it as I was a boy turning into a man, and I was so fascinated by the values. I believe in it.

I think there is a point in every teenager's life where they are forced to come into themselves.

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

I cut school to read Shakespeare and to learn about that because, for the first time, I felt like I really discovered a passion - the passion of my life.