45 Adolescence Quotes To Inspire

Adolescence is a transformative period filled with growth, discovery, and a whirlwind of emotions. It's a time when young individuals begin to carve out their identities, face new challenges, and develop a deeper understanding of the world around them. To navigate these tumultuous but exciting years, inspiration can often come from the wisdom of others who have walked the same path. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 45 quotes that capture the essence of adolescence. Whether you're a teenager searching for a bit of clarity or an adult looking to reminisce and perhaps guide the younger generation, these quotes offer powerful insights and encouragement.

1. “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” - Albert Einstein

2. “It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

3. “...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.” - proust

4. “No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.” - Stephen Fry

5. “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

6. “To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.” - Jane Austen

7. “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

8. “So you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.” - Ellen Hopkins

9. “Standing in the line at the food court, I try to be myself. But I forget how I usually stand when I'm myself.” - Susane Colasanti

10. “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

11. “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

12. “After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.” - Steven Millhauser

13. “Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.” - Junot Diaz

14. “Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you.” - Sarah Addison Allen

15. “And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.” - Stephen Chbosky

16. “Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.” - M.J. Croan

17. “Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now.” - Emily Giffin

18. “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

19. “He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.” - Jess C. Scott

20. “I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.” - Marquis de Sade

21. “Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.” - Naomi Wolf

22. “I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.” - Margaret Atwood

23. “At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.Then you grow up.” - John Marsden

24. “I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.” - Umberto Eco

25. “Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.” - John Knowles

26. “What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?” - Faraaz Kazi

27. “Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.” - Junot Diaz

28. “I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.” - Gertrude Stein

29. “Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.” - Maya Angelou

30. “Americans invented adolescence. It is not a natural phenomenon. Adolescence is a social construct, created by an urban-industrial society that keeps its young at home far past puberty. Teenage angst is a luxury if a successful modern human conceit that isn't condoned by our superior species.” - Sarah Beth Durst

31. “My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix.” - David Levithan

32. “I'm most disturbed by the theory of rubber resilience in children; as if its much easier to bounce back with youth. I see them more like Steel. When heated, they can be bent either which way. But if it's not corrected by the time things cool down, they can be forever changed.” - Zack W. Van

33. “He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.” - David Baldacci

34. “Era um dos efeitos colaterais da juventude: sair da inocência e ingenuidade da infância e cair na alienação umbigocêntrica daquela fase em que acreditamos que já somos adultos. Mas é somente isso, achismo e autoengano. Ainda há um longo caminho pela frente e muito a aprender. Muito mesmo.” - Camilo Gomes Jr

35. “Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it's more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body.” - Lidia Yuknavitch

36. “Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.” - Megan Abbott

37. “Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become then what you are.” - Jim Lynch

38. “And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that I'll have to hear Mary Elizabeth talk about all the great things she exposed me to all the time. I don't understand that. I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.” - Stephen Chbosky

39. “I guess I could say that I have lived my life in a perpetual flinch.” - Rakesh Satayal

40. “For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the pit," "slipping the turtle's head," and "chewing the stinkweed." Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux's gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers' feet and hands are doing.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

41. “The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.” - Lynda Barry

42. “Adolescence is the same tragedy being performed again and again. The only things that change are the stage props.” - Lindsey Leavitt

43. “It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.” - W. Somerset Maugham

44. “For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at least their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?” - Annie Dillard

45. “Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks....The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?” - Annie Dillard