Mary H.K. Choi Quotes

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

Teens in the '90s had the same basic desires as they do now.

I didn't even get a computer till I was 16, so I didn't have Internet when I was in middle school and beginning of high school. I didn't think to be looking things up and looking at message boards saying whether people liked me or not.

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

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Teenagers are kinda the same wherever you find them in America.

I just have a problem with youth culture.

I noticed that no matter where I went in the country, there was this group of questions that got asked. I would track them and keep them in categories. Like body image, school, family, friendship, you name it, the emotional life of a teenage girl.

My biggest crisis is that I don't understand what young people like.

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.

It has always been very important to look carefully at young people and the way they wear clothes.

My high school years were exactly like 'Superbad.'

All teens are in trouble in one form or another.

My first three years of high school, I wasn't that cool.

Today's younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

It is clear from all these data that the interests of teenagers are not focused around studies, and that scholastic achievement is at most of minor importance in giving status or prestige to an adolescent in the eyes of other adolescents.

Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers?

I am sure that adolescents find it just as confusing and difficult to understand themselves as their elders find them difficult to understand.

We didn't need the Internet for Nazi Germany to happen. But I feel like there's this lack of humanity because of it.

I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.

Facebook became ubiquitous when I was 16, so I vaguely formed a sense of myself a little bit. I had kind of learned to think a little bit before the stuff was everywhere.