Adolescent Mistakes Quotes

When I was 19, my dad got sick, and I quit college to take over his business, a coffee shop on 19th Street, below Dupont Circle in D.C. I had been working there since I was 11 years old, so it was not a stretch to think that I could do it, but my record as a teenager, in many respects, was less than stellar.

A youth with his first cigar makes himself sick; a youth with his first girl makes other people sick.

There have been times when I have goofed up, and like every adolescent, I sometimes did get led the wrong way. I would come back home really scared to face my mom's wrath and anger, but surprisingly, I never got to face one. She would always tell me in a very nice manner that what I did was wrong and that I should correct myself.

I got into a fight in my 10th-grade year, and it was on ESPN. It was a mistake, and you learn from it. Starting from the seventh grade, everything's been magnified like that. It's kind of like you have no childhood.

I spent so much of my younger life drinking, and being drunk makes learning to be a grown-up kind of hard.

I wasn't a good kid. I didn't hurt anybody, but I was doing things kids do that they shouldn't.

"I don't know," I said. "What else did you do for your first eighteen years?" "Like I said," he said as I unlocked the car, "I'm not so sure that you should go by my example." "Why not?" "Because I have my regrets," he said. "Also, I'm a guy. And guys do different stuff." "Like ride bikes?" I said. "No," he replied. "Like have food fights. And break stuff. And set off firecrackers on people's front porches. And..." "Girls can't set off firecrackers on people's front porches?" "They can," he said... "But they're smart enough not to. That's the difference."

If I had been living through the '80s, I probably would've gotten into a lot more trouble than my parents.

These are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made, we have a tendency sometimes to almost take for granted or think it's normal that so many young people end up in our criminal justice system. It's not normal. ... What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things.

I shaved my eyebrows in 10th grade.

When you get a bit older, life can start kicking and it was mainly the area I grew up in that began to lead me astray. I went down the wrong paths to some degree.

I ran away at 15 to chase a guy that I met who would become my boyfriend, and he was living in L.A.

Like many people of my generation, I feel like I survived my adolescent mischief only by a miracle, and it seems too much to hope for that the same miracle would befall my children - therefore, I want to make sure they take fewer chances than I did.

Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs - sex especially. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes - but that's their business, not yours. (You made your own mistakes, did you not?)

If you're 15 and you tell someone a secret, they can put it up on Facebook. If you make a mistake, someone films it on their mobile and puts it up on YouTube. When you're 15, you deserve privacy.

When I was in middle school, I tried to impress this girl by jumping over this ledge on a scooter. I caught the edge of the ledge and totally fell right in front of her. I never talked to her again. So [my advice is], take it easy if you have a school crush!

At the senior prom for my Catholic boarding school, I was feeling manly, so I shaved, even though I didn't need to. Being inexperienced, I managed to slice a quarter-inch gash into my lower chin a half hour before I picked up my date.