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"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
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"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."
"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."
"Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice."
"Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of."
"When had she stopped being a child? The first time a guy had whistled at her out of a car window when she was walking to school? The moment she started wondering how she looked when she ran, what jiggled or bounced, instead of the pace she was setting? The first time she'd kept from raising her hand because she didn't want to seem too smart or too eager?"
"It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything."
"Some people are boys longer than others."
"As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager."
"Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me."
"One had to be careful with elbows and boys."
Explore more quotes by John Ciardi
"Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character."
"It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions."
"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea."
"Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope."
"The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself."
"A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea."
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