Richard Leakey Quotes

I've always been a late bloomer. My body developed late. From ninth to 10th grade, I grew like 3 inches. Just kind of stretched out. I was like 6-1, grew to 6-4 in 10th grade.

I remember as a teen being able to eat more than my father. I was growing so fast and my body couldn't keep up.

I've been 6 ft. 2 ins. since I was 13.

My most string-beanish, I guess, is when I was 15 years old. From 15 to 16, I went from 155 pounds to 215. By the time I graduated from high school, I was between 235-250.

I hit a big growth spurt between my 10th and 11th grade years.

I was around 1.60 m or so, and then when I was 17 or 18 I started growing.

Child. That was a terrible thing to say to anyone who was almost thirteen.

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.

Adolescence has been recognised as a stage of human development since medieval times--long, long before the industrial revolution--and, as it is now, has long been seen as a phase which centers on the fusion of sexual and social maturity. Indeed, adolescence as a concept has as long a history as that of puberty, which is sometimes considered more concrete, and hence much easier to name and to recognize.

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.

The word that pisses me off - "prepubescent."

Early on, girls begin to menstruate, which is dramatic but not obvious to their playmates. They grow taller and rounder, but underneath their makeup they are still recognizably themselves. For boys it is far more disorienting. Puberty comes later, sometimes much later, and its delay is humiliating. While the tall round girls are getting themselves up like grown women, the prepubertal boys, with their featureless, hairless bodies, are just dirty little kids who could pass for the children of the hypermature girls.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

I grew six inches in a year.

I went from being a beanpole - like a normal kid of the 1950s - and exploded. The weight piled on and didn't stop until into my adulthood.

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

I went through puberty late. I was a little, little, tiny kid. I was still growing in college.

I did not have implants, I just had a growth spurt.

Girls of 7, 8 or 9 years old are not emotionally or psychologically equipped to handle puberty.

I grew really fast. It's true I went from 5'6" to 6'1" in six months in 8th grade. By the end of 8th grade, I was 6'1". Everyone was freaking out.

I am sure that adolescents find it just as confusing and difficult to understand themselves as their elders find them difficult to understand.

I've been six feet tall since the sixth grade.

I can see why people keep having babies. We were looking at a school for my youngest this morning, and there were all these little boys and girls. So sweet. And then the teenagers walk past, and, my God, they're enormous, and I bet they don't kiss their mummies. I'm just going to force my children to remain lovely.