Quotes about Adolescence

I can remember in my adolescence feeling that many of the things that were hurtful and hypocritical in society were things related to sex. They included the kind of censorship laws that existed in the movies and books when I was young. Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere. The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture. Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think. Man has boyhood, adolescence, youth, middle age and senescence, as stages of growth; there are also corresponding stages in the growth of wisdom in him. I think anyone who's ever gone through adolescence and wanted something from their parents knows the basic tenets of a con. Any book that can help you survive the slings and arrows of adolescence is a book to love for life; 'The Catcher in the Rye' did just that, and I still do love it. I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera. We live a protracted adolescence. At some point you must leave the party. Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. My adolescence was all tits and champagne. I'm downplaying the magic of it all. It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area. The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne. The ripeness of adolescence is prodigal in pleasures, skittish, and in need of a bridle. I'm a big people pleaser; I had a very awkward adolescence. Part of me is still that person who wants everyone to like me. Adolescence can be a time of turmoil and turbulence, of stress and storm. Rebellion against authority and against convention is to be expected and tolerated for the sake of learning and growth. Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines. Ironically, when I hit adolescence, I was approached about modeling and acting all the time. And, for five years, I said, 'No, I'm not interested. I want a simple life, I don't want to be in the spotlight.' I decided I wanted to be a painter, and then that moved into wanting to be an animator. By adolescence, I just wanted it to be something that was important...something that would make a difference in people's lives or leave an imprint in history. To me everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process. There have been times in my adolescence where I gave up. I was like, 'I'm just never going to be pretty. I'm never going to be like one of those people on the front of magazines.' It always seemed really strange to me that the projection of how people are in advertisements looked nothing like the people who were actually buying them. You know what I mean? I never understood that mismatch, and now I really start to see that the people you see in the media are a lot more like people actually are. In adolescence I started to find out about Robert Wilson because I saw Lou Reed's 'Timerocker' at [the Brooklyn Academy of Music]. I started getting into Jim Jarmusch and knew that my uncle was a friend of his. I pieced together parts of his life in high school and college, which lead me to his story in a funny way. It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving. Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them. At adolescence a new desire is added. They want a girl to allure them. When you put these two together, you have the typical male yearning that Wonder Woman satisfies. It's about transitioning from adolescence, when you live together with parents and see each other every day, to the era when you don't live together and start to grow apart and have to figure out how you're going to have an adult relationship. Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams. Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society. The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age. I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when 'Howl' and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third- Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us? A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.