top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids-all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine-it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order."
Standard
Customized
More
"I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Insecurity, thy name is teenager."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult, and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts, ... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing."
Writing
"If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be."
Society
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
Humor
"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."
Crime
"As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it."
Science
"A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things."
Technology
"I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting."
Science
"Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness."
Science
"To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted."
Exploration
"The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population."
Economy
bottom of page