c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted.
— Edward Bunker, The Animal Factory
Once the cons were in the cell, they’d pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn’t placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn’t think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
The worst prison is not made of metal bars. The worst prison is when your internal reality does not match your external reality.
— Yasmin Mogahed
I also become the local computer nerd. The administration brings me in to fix all the computers, I create viruses to invade at a specific day and time. They call me in, and I eradicate my own virus, only to plant another one to go into effect a couple months later. They ask me why I can't just fix the computers once and for all. I tell them to quit going to porn sites and it will stay fixed. That shuts them up every time.
— Darynda Jones, Brighter Than the Sun
Don't promote yourself as a country of constitutionality and compassion if you honestly believe that putting people in prison and treating them like animals is justified. Stop all the hype that we live in a free and democratic society. I used to ramble on about the same stuff. But now—are we really a country that believes in fairness and compassion? Are we really a country that treats people fairly? I've met good men—yes, good men—in prison who made mistakes out of stupidity or ignorance, greed, or just bad judgment, but they did not need to be sent to prison to be punished; eighteen months for catching too many fish; two years for inflating income on a mortgage application; three months for selling a whale's tooth on eBay; fifteen years for a first-time nonviolent drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found or seized. There are thousands of people like these in our prisons today, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars when these individuals could be punished in smarter, alternative ways. Our courts are overpunishing decent people who make mistakes, and our prisons have no rewards or incentives for good behavior. In this alone criminal justice and prison systems contradict their own mission statements (244).
— Bernard B. Kerik
Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.
— Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
You did it! You are free!!!!!!!!
— Paige Garland, Prison post: Letters of support for Peter Greste
Were you in love with Emma?" I ask."I was hard-core obsessed," he says without thinking about it. "Not in love." "What's the difference?"He's about to throw a stone at ta yard light but stops. "Prison," he says, and puts the stone in his pocket.
— Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
That’s the ironic thing about time, Doc. One the one hand, we don’t have much of it for this, but it’s all I have in here.
— Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force
Freedom comes with a price while bondage takes hold without notice
— Mark L. Baynard
You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.
— Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force
Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.
— Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force
I was up really early. It was the day of my selection tests and interviews to become a Prison Officer. The recruitment process was an absolute joke ... Everyone could have travelled round the world seven fucking times before they hear[d] back from the Service's recruitment cowboys.
— Ronnie Thompson
There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.
— Charlie Engle
I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.
— Sally Green, Half Bad
In prison, you learn to count each day and each moment. You even count the bad 'meals' and the unbearable ones.
— Abdullah Abu Snaineh, 13
Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.
— Anton Chekhov, The Bet and Other Stories
That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...
— Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East
Truth shrilled in prison or cemetary.
— Toba Beta
4 levels of Education
—  1.mom & dad 2.education 3. medication 4. Prison.
All the studies and all the research in the field of criminology affirm that prison education is the least expensive and most effective solution to overcrowding and strain on the budget caused by recevidism.
— Christopher Zoukis, College for Convicts: The Case for Higher Education in American Prisons
[Lord Horror] was so unique and radical, I expected to go to prison for it. I always thought that if you wrote a truly dangerous book -- something dangerous would happen to you. Which is one reason there are so few really dangerous books around. Publishers play at promoting dangerous books, whether they're Serpent's Tail or Penguin. All you get is a book vetted by committee, never anything radically imaginative or offensive that will take your fucking head off. Ironically, I think it would do other authors a power of good if they had to account for their books by going to prison -- there are far too many bad books being published!
— David Britton
I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely." I added."You talking about mom?" Ben said"I was talking about me.""You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brother and I matched palms.
— Gillian Flynn
Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?
— Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black
When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.
— Ron Brackin
I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way – but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn’t hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...
— H. Alazhar, City of Paradise
Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living masses.We walk toward its pathno earthly power surpasses.
— Craig Froman, An Owl on the Moon: A Journal from the Edge of Darkness
When you are born into bondage you can't see the prison.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.
— Richard Price, Clockers
No matter how well meaning and astute the investigators are or how well-researched, witnessed and documented the incidents of cruelty are, a prison is a prison is a prison. The structure of authority that produces the oppressed and the oppressor alike is the key to understanding the problem. Contained within this structure is the authoritative power to agendize language, which is simply another control mechanism.
— Gayle K. Horii
No sun cream or condoms, just in case you’re looking at the lady-boys. There’s plenty of AIDS lingering about and every STD you can imagine.
— Simon  Palmer, Lost Innocence: The Accused
The world is a prison for the believer and paradise for a non-believer.
— Anonymous
I like visiting people in prison. I can say whatever I want to them, and they can’t do anything about it.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
Brightlord Adolin insisted. So long as you were in here, he wouldn't leave. We tried to stop him, but the man’s a prince. We can’t storming make him do anything, not even leave. He locked himself away in the cell and we just had to live with it.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?
— John Waters, Role Models
I want to release my soul from its prison cell, to silence the guards who tell me that I am not capable of living. Every voice that ever told me that I cannot achieve has, at this moment, become silenced. This cell is no longer my home.
— Leigh Hershkovich, Shattered Illusions
Let me out Aphador.' Penteluck said smoothly.'So you can attempt to run away, I think not.
— Keisha Keenleyside, The Spirit Master
Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were called "dungeons" ; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed ofan iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four stone walls, and it is called "punishment cell.
— Victor Hugo
I am afraid the greatest prison that people live in is the fear what other people think... Grow up & lose the fear.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
The damn vermin are so numerous that I am afraid to sneeze, for fear the damned lice would regard it as gong for dinner, and eat me up - Robert Cobb Kennedy
— Tobin T. Buhk, True Crime in the Civil War: Cases of Murder, Treason, Counterfeiting, Massacre, Plunder & Abuse
They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!
— John Cage, M: Writings '67-'72
Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!" he announced cheerfully. "Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.
— Dominic Stevenson, Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China
We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.
— Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black
These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.
— Colin Wilson, The Outsider
We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.
— Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that inprisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.
— Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
— G.K. Chesterton
[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!
— Megan Sweeney, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading
Mr Moss's courtyard is railed in like a cage, lest the gentlemen who are boarding with him should take a fancy to escape from his hospitality.
— William Makepeace Thackeray
If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice. Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.  "Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly. A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.
— Margery Sharp, The Rescuers
After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear.
— R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room
Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge
— Jan Valtin, Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin
the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.
— P.G. Wodehouse
When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Teenagers. Everything is so apocalyptic.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
The boys and girls in the clique. The awful names that they stick. You're never gonna fit in much kid, but it you're troubled and hurt, what you've got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did!
— Gerard Way
People say teenagers think they're immortal, and I agree with that. But I think there's a difference between thinking you're immortal and knowing you can survive. Thinking you're immortal leads to arrogance, thinking you deserve the best. Surviving means having the worst thrown at you and being able to continue on despite that. It means striving for what you want most, even when it seems our of your reach, even when everything is working against you.
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
— Fran Lebowitz
A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.
— Kelly Link
Juno MacGuff: Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into? 
— Diablo Cody, Juno: The Shooting Script
For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Juno MacGuff: I don't know what kind of girl I am. 
— Diablo Cody, Juno: The Shooting Script
She was young and alive, untouchable. Why did she want to go?
— Courtney Summers, Fall for Anything
I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you.
— Stephen King
After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.
— Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
Sometimes I wish I could just be like everyone else my age and not think at all.
— Julia Karr, XVI
Let your inner DORK shine through.
— Rachel Renée Russell, Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life
...real teenage boys aren't like characters in the books you read. They smell funny and are obsessed with video games and say dumb things. They're still learning, just like you.
— Stacey Jay, Juliet Immortal
High school is worse than having to swim through multiple prahana filled lakes- and that's before the truckload of homework.
— Taylor Gaskins
Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we’re rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we’re so ready for our rebellious phase we can’t help but feel it’s safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.
— Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight
Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?"Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement
This is followed by laughter because we're in high school, which means we're predictable and almost everything is funny, especially if it's someone else's public humiliation.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
Before she closed the door, she hit me with this one: "I feel like it's November first," she said, "and I'm that discarded jack-o'-lantern whose heart and guts are splattered all over the boulevard of broken promises.""And a good night to you, too," I said.
— Rick Detorie
Post-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
— Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
You're staring," Lana said."Yes. I am. I'm a teenage boy. Beautiful girls in wet underwear have a tendency to cause staring in teenage boys.
— Michael  Grant, Plague
I ignored him, concentrating on Lilith. "According to the stories, after you were expelled from Eden you went down into Hell, where you coupled with demons and gave birth to all the monsters that have plagued the world.""I was young," said Lilith. "You know how it is. We all do things we later regret, when we're being rebellious teenagers.
— Simon R. Green, Hex and the City
Homeschool doesn’t give you a get out of teenage jail free card. It justgives you fewer opportunities to become the butt of someone’s lame Facebook joke.
— Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue
We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years
— Dan Chaon, Among the Missing
I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.
— Eric Hoffer
To now is to love, to see is a joy, but to lose is hurtful.
— Rubye Armorer, Bam Bam's Story: A Celebrated Life
Teachers need to sit with their journal and write in the voice of that teenager. Write and remember. That’s who we teach!
— Penny Kittle, Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing
It's going to be okay," Park said.She nodded. "Right.""Because I love you."She laughed. "Is that why?""It is, actually.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
There's not such thing as handsome princes, she told herself.There's no such thing as happily ever after.She looked up at Park. Into his golden green eyes.You saved my life, she tried to tell him.Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily. But you saved my life, and now I'm yours. The me that's right now is yours. Always.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
Yes, I was scared, vulnerable, and fragile and lived in books more than real life. Yet there was nothing Mom could do to make things easier for me, just worse by grounding me for life at the slightest hint of truth. Why? Because in spite of what she said she did not trust me or, to put it in her words, I did not know what was good for me.Being a teenager sucks! I might as well have been in prison.
— Gaia B. Amman, Sex-O-S: The Tragicomic Adventure of an Italian Surviving the First Time
I knew," he murmurs. I can hear him over the music only because he says it right in my ear. "Right after we talked in the mall, I knew.""Knew what?""That you were going to be the first girl to break my heart."My breath catches. I force the smile now. "I haven't broken anything yet, right?""You will. Someday. But everybody breaks everything. For now we're fantastic. It's just, the better we get, the harder I realize the fall will be.
— Michelle Painchaud
(From the Q&A with the author at the end of the book.)Have any readers ever asked questions that shocked you?I have gotten one question repeatedly from young men. These are guys who liked the book, but they are honestly confused. They ask me why Melinda was so upset about being raped.The first dozen times I heard this, I was horrified. But I heard it over and over again. I realized that many young men are not being taught the impact that sexual assault has on a woman. They are inundated by sexual imagery in the media, and often come to the (incorrect) conclusion that having sex is not a big deal. This, no doubt, is why the number of sexual assaults is so high.I am also shocked by adults who feel that rape is an inappropriate topic to discuss with teenagers. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 44 percent of rape victims are under the age of 18 and 46 percent of those victims are between the ages of 12-15. It makes adults uncomfortable to acknowledge this, but our inability to speak clearly and openly about sexual issues endangers our children. It is immoral not to discuss this with them.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,' he said. 'I think that’s kind of the point of them.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
Are you a terrorist? Or just an idiot?
— Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている 1
Don't you have something teenagery to do -- rage against authority, roll your eyes, mooch off your parents?
— Kay Honeyman, Interference
Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,” he said. “I think that’s kind of the point of them.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
You're a beautiful and wonderful and sensual and strong golden fawn, she says, followed by That was supposed to say "my best friend," but my phone...
— Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World
One would think, however, that sharing a name might offer a thin string of connection. It was always a thrill to meet someone who had the same name as you, and unlike a lot of things, this was a thrill that never quite faded.
— Pam   Jones, The Cost of Paper: Volume Three
(...) I could "talk fast" -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Web analytics is like teenage sex:- Everyone talks about it.- Nobody really knows how to do it.- Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
— Marcus Österberg
I stop at the tune store, where I'm greeted by Javier and Jules. Half the store is Javier's, half is Jules's—they have entirely different musical tastes, so you have to know going in whether the tune you're looking for is more like Javier or Jules. They have been together for more than twenty years, and today as they offer me cider and argue the blues, I want to ask them how they've done it. To be together with someone for twenty years seems like an eternity to me. I can't seem to manage twenty days. Twenty weeks would be a stretch. How can they stand there behind the counter, spinning songs for each other day in and day out? How can they find things to say—how can they avoid saying things they'll always regret? How do you stay together? I want to ask them, the same way I want to ask my happy parents, the same way I want to go up to old people and ask them 'what is it like to live so long'?
— David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy
A teenager boy is a monstrous cyborg, an unfeeling, beastly machine, not fully human, and not housebroken. Rumbustious teenage boys are an infernal organism disdainful of everything, yet intent of contributing to human evolution.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A human teenager. One of God’s most misbegotten creatures – big like grown-ups and yet dumb like children.
— Eliza Crewe, Cracked
The person who said that it is lonely at top has no idea what the view looks like from above. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we're stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It's not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Do me a favour and go out and perform one of the activities I hear the youth enjoy this Friday, like defacing public property.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken
Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.
— Austin Grossman, You
With each tweet, post, share and comment, we are building and adding to our digital iceberg.
— Tiffany Sunday, You Posted What!?: How to Help Your Teen Use Social Media to Gain an Advantage for College and Future Employment
Whenever my colleagues and I encounter a boy who acts "normal"—not explosively violent, not oppositional to every word, not obsessed with killing and dying, not focused on sexual objectification—we are overjoyed with his potential. Here is one who has a stronger foundation on which to build, one who will not knock down his every success like a child with a brick castle to see if the adults will keep helping him rebuild.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Reference Handbook
Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer’s phone number.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Reference Handbook
If the only one who can kill an angel can’t do it, then who can?’ It’s a good question, one that takes me a minute to come up with an answer. ‘Obadiah West can. Him and his freedom fighters. I’m just a teenager.’‘History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great. They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we’re back to those times again, kid.
— Susan Ee, End of Days
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Christmas and the others can end up making you sad, because you know you should be happy. But on Halloween you get to become anything that you want to be
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
If you love her. If you want her to stay. Fight for her.
— Janet Gurtler The Truth About Us
I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are. Sometimes at work I get the feeling that it's got to be right up against 100%. I’ll head out to the register to help out during the lunch rush and the new cashier will look so confused and lost, and then I’ll look at the customers she’s supposed to be helping, and they’ll look lost, too, and then when I sneak a glance toward the tables there’ll be all these people staring at their food or at each other with blank looks in their eyes. And I’ll think: Is this just me? Is everybody else actually fine, and I’m just trying to imagine that they’re like me? But I don’t think so. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m pretty sure that some ridiculous percentage of the population is walking around feeling like aliens.	I think teenagers feel that all the time...
— John Darnielle
How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we're mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that's why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we're immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that's why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.
— Charles Frazier, Nightwoods
What seems is not what is. Because, none knows what is left, when it is all right!
— Pooja A.H.
This was 1991, remember. We didn't have the Internet. So, as teenagers, we lived on the phone. There was no webcamming, no social networking. We dreamt simply of having our own personal phone lines one day, along with uninterrupted hours to talk, and we rarely got that. No matter who we were talking to, no matter how private the conversation, parents picked up the phone accidentally, siblings demanded their time. The introduction of call waiting made all of this even worse, as it allowed aunts and uncles and people you didn't even know to butt in. This is part of why we talked so late in the night, Lindy and I, all of us teens. This is why we looked so pale in our grunge clothes. These night hours were the only times we felt we could tell the truth without danger, the only times we could live separately from our parents while still inside of their homes. There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simple one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.
— M.O. Walsh
I thought you were just typical teenagers.”No one has ever called me typical. I can’t say I like it.
— Sarah Nicolas, Dragons Are People, Too
All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.
— Jonathan Tropper
Insecurity, thy name is teenager.
— Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty
Teenagers are complicated and at times stubborn, yes, but we are not dumb. We see the world in a different light than the rest do, and sometimes, we’re misunderstood because of it. And that’s alright. That must be the definition of ‘human being’: Misunderstood. But neither of us should tolerate degradation in any of it forms.
— Pamela Nicole, Fit In or Fit Out
I was hoping we could just listen to Jimmy Eat World and forget we ever grew up.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from yournipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, ‘Get a life, Mum.’This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.
— Joanne Fedler
They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Education these days is making youths suffer like mental patients, but no one has anything to say about it because there is no other option to be given.
— Meghan Blistinsky
You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.
— Joanne Fedler
We won’t be able to choose who we’ll have to talk to in order to keep advancing in life. We won’t always like them, and they will most likely not like us back either, so it’s wrong to confine ourselves in our own little worlds when there’s plenty of it outside to explore.
— Pamela Nicole, Fit In or Fit Out
The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.
— Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up.But – and here’s the catch – we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy – the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives – in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing – suddenly become ‘none of our business.
— Joanne Fedler
They're really into it, laughing and teasing each other, and I am looking at Pam and thinking once again how she is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and that if we were back in the olden times she might have been made into a goddess because she is so beautiful. Sometimes I cannot stop my mind. It's scary.
— James Howe, The Misfits
Homo Cannot Erectus
— Adham T. Fusama, Dead Smokers Club Part 1
Sudah gue bilang: punk is only hibernating, not dead!
— Adham T. Fusama, Dead Smokers Club Part 1
I see that even as the world plunges into darkness and peril, you two stand around discussing your love lives. Teenagers.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
You are a pearl of great price to me, but there are times when you are an almighty trial to those who love you.
— Charles Portis, True Grit
Her youngest daughter shrugged. “Ain’t got no money, do we?” “I don’t understand. Why aren’t you pillaging like the rest of your kin?” “It was the Northlands, Da. Ain’t nothin’ to pillage but the crows in the trees.” “And snow,” their eldest added. “Lots and lots of snow.” Bram motioned to his study. “You know where I keep the gold coin.” As if on fire, their offspring made a desperate run for their father’s study, climbing over the table and fighting each other through the door. It wasn’t pretty.
— G.A. Aiken, Supernatural
Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.
— Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories
One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
— Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter
Until kids find something worth dying for, they don't have anything worth living for.
— Tim Kimmel, Why Christian Kids Rebel: Trading Heartache for Hope
Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are
— Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
She had not told her mother about Denys, but she had a suspicion that Mrs. Shannon knew all about it nevertheless. It was unlike her not to want to satisfy her curiosity when she came upon her daughter sobbing in various parts of the house. She had asked no questions; she had simply donned the role of the heavily understanding mother, and had done a lot of shoulder-patting and given Mary an expensive evening dress from the shop. Mary had no idea how she knew, but was certain that if she had not known she would never have rested until she did.
— Monica Dickens, Mariana
Saylor and Beau worked together not like a piston head turned by a camshaft, but like the torque created from such synchronicity.
— Suzanne Cowles, Shallow Basin
Damn Disney & all their happily-after-ever, unrealistic bullshit stories
— Jillian Dodd, Stalk Me
The hard way is my favorite way to learn.
— Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs
Women dress for women, if we dressed for me, we'd all be running around naked.
— Jillian Dodd, Stalk Me
Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake when she tires of it. A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
— Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Ricky was a young boy, he had a heart of stone./Tequila in his heartbeat, his veins burned gasoline./18 and life you got it.
— Skid Row
Life is too short, you know? You have to make the best of it. Do things most teenagers wouldn’t do.
— Tessa Emily Hall, Purple Moon
If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.
— Jacob M. Appel
If you work around at-risk teen students, actually tell them you love them and have faith in their success. No one tells them that. No one.
— Ace Antonio Hall, Confessions of Sylva Slasher
My darling goddaughter, Olivia, was the little girl of my friends, Max and Jeff. She was turning four, and it was time to transition her from her shortened toddler bed to a full-size big girl bed. It would be the bed where she'd have her childhood dreams and her teenage angst. I wanted it strong enough to tolerate her little girl bouncing and her teenage flouncing.It had to be perfect.
— Amber Kell, Vampire Wanted
A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.
— Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
It takes a good habit to replace a bad habit.
— Melody Carlson, Blade Silver: Color Me Scarred
This is the thing about school dances. They make like it's supposed to be this other-worldly thing, but really it's just the people you see every day dressed up, standing in the gym in the dark with Red Hot Chili Peppers playing.
— Mariko Tamaki, Skim
In that second, I think about running through that door and going with him. But I know that it’s not the road I’m meant for.Because we’re both still incapable of love. We’re both not ready yet.And I know that I’ll miss him. And some nights, I’ll cry in my sleep.But for now, I’m okay. And that’s all that matters.The void in my heart has finally been filled.And as the train moves farther and farther from me on the platform, I can only smile.
— L. Jayne, Chasing After Infinity
It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
By his stripes you are healed.
— Melody Carlson, Blade Silver: Color Me Scarred
...it really struck me that, just as people might look at me and never imagine I'd worked as a prostitute, they must look at some of those girls and see only the alienation and disaffection that hides their on fears and hurt.
— Sophie Hayes, Trafficked: My Story of Surviving, Escaping, and Transcending Abduction Into Prostitution
Let me give you some advice here: People who want to have the sex talk with you will act the same way as people who want to murder you. First they get you in their car, so they're in control and you can't escape. Then they drive you someplace in the middle of nowhere.
— Flynn Meaney, The Boy Recession
When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
— John Green
I've been asking around to find out what girls are into," Eugene tells me, really pleased with himself. "So I'm gonna get a spray tan and make red-velvet cupcakes.
— Flynn Meaney, The Boy Recession
Shut off the internal bashing.
— Melody Carlson, Blade Silver: Color Me Scarred
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
— John Green
Love and romance are things worth waiting for.
— Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
So how did you get this job, anyway?' I asked.'My science teacher.''Why'd he pick you?''For my brains and good looks, obviously.''Yeah, right. My social studies teacher picked me, but I can't really figure out why."'For your brains and good looks, obviously.''Um, thanks.' Had Aaron just complimented me? Wow.
— Polly Shulman, The Grimm Legacy
...but maybe it's just the genetic code of a teenager. If your parents forbid something, you have to want it.
— Brynna Gabrielson, Starkissed
As a teenager, I didn’t want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me.
— Marion Cotillard
Jordana is in the umpire's highchair.I walk under the rugby posts and on to the tennis courts, stopping a few metres in front of her, in the service box.Her legs are crossed.I wait for her to speak.'I have two special skills,' she says.She pulls a sheaf of papers from under her bum. I recognize the font and the text boxes. It's my pamphlet.'Blackmail,' she says.She holds up her Zippo in the other hand. I can tell that she has been practising this.'And pyromania.'I am impressed that Jordana knows this word.'Right,' I say.'I'm going to blackmail you, Ol.'I feel powerless. She is in a throne.'Okay,' I say.
— Joe Dunthorne, Submarine
Storming was one of her main modes of transportation." In reference to teenager Heather in "Carry The One
— Carol Anshaw