In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple.... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time.... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.
Greasers will still be greasers and Socs will still be Socs. Sometimes I think it's the ones in the middle that are really the lucky stiffs.
When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.
People reacted to how I looked, and that was certainly a power to have as a young girl, but not one that you really understand.
That messed me up, growing up in the public eye when I was a teenager. That's when everyone is trying to find themselves.
I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls - I had no chance in either - I found my comfort in Jesus.
When I was 12 years old, I read 'Nancy Drew' mysteries and biographies of Madame Curie and Florence Nightingale and books about girls who love horses or go to nursing school. I belonged to the Girl Scouts and got A's in school and rarely disobeyed my parents. I still kept a collection of Barbie dolls in my room, and I almost never spoke to boys.
An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.
I had found The Runaways and I had seen Foxes, and I decided I was just gonna become a juvie, like Cherie Currie.
It’s hard to look at Barron now, but I do. He’s smirking. His black hair and black suit make him into a shadow, as if I conjured some dark mirror of myself.
Lena made a face. She almost never wore makeup; she didn't have to. "You know, it's not like we all sign a contract with Maybelline when we turn thirteen.
When I was 16, the pot weeded out the men from the boys, there were the heads and the straights. Now it's almost like money can weed it out, you know?
There's nothing more terrifying then a teenage girl.
Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.
Being famous before you've formed your personality, before you have that self-esteem, is dangerous.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
It's so normal for a teenager to dress in black -- and be real unhappy and stay in your room and say sarcastic things. How could something so normal be considered morbid?
A teenager usually wants to try to get people to notice him in some way, to feel like someone gives a damn. Me, all that attention, I just wanted to fade into the background. Be invisible. Disappear.
When I was growing up, the people who liked the Beatles, I didn't like, so I didn't pay attention to them.
Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.
A small olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend.
Adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness in thems.elves that seeks expression. They gesture towards the heart when trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair.
[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less.
