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"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."
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Exlpore more Adolescence quotes
"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
"Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me."
"So I hear we get to go to town this weekend. Want to catch a movie or something?--ZP.S. That is, if Jimmy doesn't mind.Translation: This weekend might be a good chance for us to see each other outside our school in a social environment, free of competetiton. I do not view other boys as threats, and I enjoy making them seem insignificant by calling them the wrong names. (Translation by Macey McHenry)"
"Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice."
"It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything."
"He loved me.Noah Hutchins had told me he loved me, and that had made the past week at school absolute hell."
"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."
"I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable."
"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?"
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith
"You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality."
"It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?"
"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."
"At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls."
"And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings."
"It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone."
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