Walter Benjamin Quotes

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

You never choose the way that you're raised, it's just the way that you were raised, but you do get to a certain age where you're in a position to question the expectations of you and the way that you've been formed by your surroundings.

When I was 13 and looking for my identity, I was obsessed with hippies.

Aunt May's values and Spiderman's traumas are kind of what's defined him as a young boy and now that he's becoming a young man, she's there to provide that safe place where he can still be a kid if he needs to be, or know that he has a home base as he's going through all these physical changes. So as long as those essentials are there, we can work on finding the character together.

This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage.

Adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness in thems.elves that seeks expression. They gesture towards the heart when trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair.

The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself. . . . Love of oneself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

Act your age don't pretend to be older than you are give yourself time to grow

I think we've all experienced sort of becoming who we are as a reaction to what we come from.

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences.

There's nothing more terrifying then a teenage girl.

In adolescence you have to separate yourself and establish your identity. So, being very independent anyway, I took charge.

All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

She'd never in her whole life bunked school, smoked dope, or kissed a boy whose name she didn't know, and yet in the last few days, she'd done all these things.

Everything that we criticize young actresses for, they're supposed to do because that's when we're supposed to make mistakes. And find out who we are.

All the best human impulses can be traced back to adolescence.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

I feel that in all kids that I've came across, that at the age of 12-13 is a big transition . They begin forming the Young Adult there going to become, here molding . I can't put a "name" on it but it's something. Your trying to find yourself, were getting ready to go to High School and as this world teaches you, you must "belong" to something. (So we Belong to Something)

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

I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you're not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.

I was between 14 and 15, when I went through my angsty period. I was never very rebellious. I never did things to rebel against society, or against my parents, but I did think I knew everything. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I was a dot in this universe, and that quickly dissipated.

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

It's okay to grow up, it's just slowing down that's the scary part. Running out of time. It's okay to grow up, but it doesn't mean you have to become like your parents.