#puberty

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#energetic #holding #job #keep #long

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop. ↗

— Caroline Knapp

#power #puberty #sexuality #imagination

What’s so beautiful about girls?” I would implore. And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn’t possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; “You’ll understand someday, James. ↗

— Jake Vander Ark

#growing-up #puberty #puppy-love #the-perfect-girl #age

The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten. ↗

— George William Curtis

#any #believe #big #big mistake #did

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. ↗

— David James Duncan

#family

Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ...It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working. ↗

— Tina Fey

#feminist #puberty #age

The best things in life make you sweaty. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#life #love #meaning-of-life #philosophical #puberty

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine. ↗

— Germaine Greer

#creating #female #feminine #ought #personality

I was really lucky that I came to puberty at a time when music and politics were completely intertwined. ↗

— Bob Geldof

#completely #i #i came #intertwined #lucky

Hey, look—your girlfriend is saying something." Artemis had a vast mental reserve of scathing comebacks at his disposal, but none of them covered girlfriend insults. He wasn't even sure if it was an insult. And if it was, who was being insulted? Him or the girl? ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#humor #insults #puberty #humor