Sandra Tsing Loh Quotes

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

I envision presenting parents with a marketplace of school choices - public, private, parochial, charter, virtual, blended, and home education. They then can choose the model that best equips their children for success.

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

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

I loved high school. I had the best high school experience of all time. I know that's not a common feeling, but it's the best. You're like, you know, 14 and expressing yourself on a daily basis creatively? That's pretty incredible.

Middle-class families know education begins at birth.

If my child were in a school where he was not learning, I would not wait for a gathering of social scientists to tell me whether it was okay for me to send him to another school.

Everything when you're a teenager is a projection. Or at least, for me, it was. 'Who am I gonna be?'

You discover two things when you're a teenager. One, that your parents are not the idols that you thought they were when you were growing up, if you had nice parents. And two, that you have power over them, and you can upset them and confront them and attack them.

As a teenager, you're still discovering who you are, what your life is about, and who you want to be as a person. It's very intense.

College is a time where a lot of people try to find themselves.

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

When I went into the conservatory at 17, then I was able to open up and accept everything about myself and show my feminine side as well as my masculine.

When I was between 18 and 25 it was like I had problem finding the middle of my personality.

I was raised by women. I have my parents, but I have two older sisters and I would learn from them about what is a female and what is a girl and what is an adolescent and what is a young woman and I was very close to them.

One of the reasons I never went into pro football was because I wanted my kids to grow up around an academic environment. And that's exactly what we did.

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

Juno MacGuff: I don't know what kind of girl I am.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

Puberty was definitely difficult for me.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.

I'm happy that I've raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.