At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting one how painful it had been at the time.

— Jodi Picoult

Bailey took an exasperated breath and sat up in the seat. “You can’t reason with a teenage girl.” Elise’s eyebrow shot up. “Bailey, you’re a teenage girl.”“Exactly.

— Heather McVea

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. Gilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

— Megan Abbott

- ...before I was going to college, my secret plan was to one day not tell anybody and just get on some bus to some random city and just move there and become this totally different person. - Then what? - ...and not come back until I had totally become this person... I used to think about it all the time... - I don't get it... - That's because you don't utterly loathe yourself

— Daniel Clowes

Bittersweet: it's what life tastes like. And if you can handle the bitter, the sweet will come later. ~ Clyde, in Piranhas Like S'mores.

— J.Z. Bingham

But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.

— Emma Cline

But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true.

— Audrey Niffenegger

But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl.

— Emma Cline

But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Childhood introduces children to the wounds of the world.

— Kilroy J. Oldster