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
"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
"Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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 forgettingone how painful it had been at the time."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Insecurity, thy name is teenager."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some people are boys longer than others."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business " that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The conflict between the need to belong to a group and the need to be seen as unique and individual is the dominant struggle of adolescence."
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
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's very important my parent's don't think I'm starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I'm growing up, and I'm kind of trying to keep it a secret. I think it will cause an incident."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War."
Parenting
"In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless."
Adaptation
"Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed."
Light
"Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books."
Literature
"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."
Architecture
"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."
Conflict
"When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on."
Life
"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
"In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
Science
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
Humor
bottom of page