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"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."
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Exlpore more Adolescence quotes

"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."

"As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager."

"Insecurity, thy name is teenager."

"I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable."

"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."

"Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of."

"Adolescence isn't just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses."

"At 17, 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 was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time."

"When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24 - year - old girl."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.'" He looked at me again. "You know?"I nodded."Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing."

"Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness."

"Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience."

"If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows."

"One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk--a sadly appropriate word here--of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn't do any good at all."

"I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time."

"I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations."

"They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally."
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