"Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us."
— Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty)

"No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"'Peter,' she asked, trying to speak firmly, 'what are your exact feelings for me?'
'Those of a devoted son, Wendy.'
'I thought so,' she said, and went and sat by herself at the extreme end of the room.
'You are so queer,' he said, frankly puzzled, 'and Tiger Lily is just the same. There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother.'
'No, indeed, it is not,' Wendy replied with frightful emphasis."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"...the salient feature of the absurd age I was at--an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich-- is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything."
— Marcel Proust

"A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide."
— Mickey Mantle

"Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence."
— Alice Thomas Ellis

"The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures."
— Sara Paretsky (Bleeding Kansas)

""So you love me," said Petra softly when the kiss ended.

"I'm a raging mass of hormones thet I'm too young to understand," said Bean. "You're a female of a closely related species. According to all the best primatologists, I really have no choice."

"That's nice," she said..."
— Orson Scott Card (Shadow Puppets)

"For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."
— Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions: Gifford Lectures Given at Aberdeen, Scotland April--November 1985)

"Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.
"Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars."
The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and cicrcled the wall of the pot slowly.
I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, "Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today." I was smelling the berries and Mamaa's sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.
"Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam."
"Elly doesn't like anything anymore."
The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.
"Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama."
Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice spayed across the table. She started at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.
I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserved it. I also knew that Mama was too far gone to understand why I deserved it. She'd swung that spoon in a tigerish reflex at blasphemy. But I believed that Arty had turned his back on us, that the twins were broken, that the Chick was lost, that Papa was weak and scared, that Mama was spinning fog, and that I was an adolescent crone sitting in the ruins, watching the beams crumble, and warming myself in the smoke from the funeral pyre. That was how I felt, and I wanted company. I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me. Maybe, too, enough of my child heart was still with me to think that if she would only open her eyes she could fix it all back up like a busted toy" (277-278)."
— Katherine Dunn (Geek Love: A Novel)