Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

By the time I was 16, I was someone to reckon with. I was so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race, I would go above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my drive as a teenager.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

We're all just trying to fit in and find ourselves, particularly when we're growing up.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

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

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

At school, I could talk about what other kids were talking about. Maybe I wouldn't seem so strange if I connected with them on the level they were used to.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.

I grew up in a remarkable home, the middle of seven children. My parents raised us well. They loved us well. We laughed hard growing up. But being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home, whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three. When you don't know where you fit inside the home and you're young and you're desperate to fit in somewhere, I'd figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some bad decisions about who I hung out with, I dropped out of high school, got kicked out of the house.

I think everyone to a certain degree wants to be accepted.

I wanted to be like some of the other young ladies that were in my school. I used to get picked on in church. Nobody wants to hang out with me. I want to hang out with the cool girls, and I started to take the wrong turn and do things I knew wasn't right.

I think we all want to fit in at a young age.

I came out when I was 15 at school, and I realized I had put myself into a precarious situation. It was a very hostile environment for me, and a lot of kids had it in for me. It was a scary situation. I was very impatient. I wanted to grow up now.

My teenage life was a little strange.

We all struggle to find our place, and schools can be cruel to kids who aren't part of a pack.

When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.

At a young age, I was very aware I was different and not perceived in a good way. For a lot of my adolescence, I struggled with that, trying to identify where I belong and who my real friends are.

In this society, you have to belong to something, I feel, and all we have in the neighborhood is a gang.

In middle school, you're figuring out how you're affecting people, and sometimes you're affecting people negatively. And what sucks is that it can affect people for their whole lives. I didn't realize I was a part of that.

Like any other kid, I was trying so hard to fit in that school made no sense to me. I wasn't attending class; I was trying to hang out in the caf with the cool kids. I was always trying to be cool.

At 14, I'd have given my left arm to be a boy: I thought I was horrible and that no-one would ever find me attractive.

As teenagers, we go through social, emotional and physical changes... and sometimes, to feel comfortable, we end up doing things that are not true to who we are just to fit in and feel loved.