adolescent social dynamics Quotes

School, in general, was not great. Children are just mean to each other... but by high school, I probably stopped being annoying to people, and people stopped being mean. By the end of it, it was wonderful.

Teenagers travel in droves, packs, swarms. ... To the librarian, they're a gaggle of geese. To the cook, they're a scourge of locusts. To department stores, they're a big beautiful exaltation of larks ... all lovely and loose and jingly.

In no order of things is adolescence the time of the simple life.

We spend our whole lives recovering from high school.

Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

Fortunately for me, I ran across some girls I could get along with so I could enjoy high school life okay, but it must be awful for kids who don't get along with anybody. We're different from our parents, a completely different species from our teachers. And kids who are one grade apart you are in a different world altogether. In other words, we're basically surrounded by enemies and have to make it on our own.

I was kind of a floater [in high school]. I got along with different types of people but I just was not cool, and definitely a late bloomer.

What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?

You were at school and you were pimply and no one wanted to know you. You get into a group and you've got thousands of chicks there.

I just remember seventh grade as being really difficult, because there's nothing meaner than a girl at that age. You gang up on people, and it's traumatic. It wasn't so bad for me, but there's a woman I know who's still traumatized by junior high. At that age, everything seems like a huge deal, but of course that changes when you get older.

High School. Society’s bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life.

High School: Oh, man. This is where boys and girls go from tweens to teens and become complicated and cruel. Girls play sick mind games; boys try to pull each other's penises off and throw them in the bushes. If you can, buy the most expensive jeans in a two-hundred-mile radius of your town and wear them on your first day. If anyone asks how you could afford them say that your father is the president of Ashton Kutcher. When they are like, 'Ashton Kutcher has a president?' answer, 'Yes.' Everyone will be in awe of you and you won't have to go through a lot of pain and cat fights.

Kids who go to normal school are so teenagery, so angsty.

Whereas when I was a teenager, other teenagers didn't want anything to do with me. It was even like that in college to a degree. People of that age don't want anything to do with their childhood, because they had put away childish things, and they're trying to distance themselves.

So much of your identity in junior high is built on who you're with. You see the world through the lens of how you identify and have been identified at that time.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

TRYING TO BE POPULAR IN HIGH SCHOOL IS LIKE TRYING TO BE MAYOR OF A CITY THAT WON'T EXIST IN FOUR YEARS.

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.