Adolescent Angst Quotes

How can growing up really be about falling down? ~ Janet Turpin Myers

As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship - a thing that is earth-old. ~ Mary MacLane

Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave. ~ Mary MacLane

My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair - the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure. ~ Carlene Bauer

It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone. ~ Mary MacLane

Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end. ~ Mary MacLane

All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged."
"Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. ~ Cassandra Clare

And is it worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one's mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one's heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else. ~ Mary MacLane

From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me. ~ Mary MacLane

The whole place is a petri dish of angst, generated by kids whose parents gave up on them, which is the worst kind of angst there is. There are fights and ridiculous posturing on a daily basis. ~ Neal Shusterman

I think that is a universal adolescent feeling, trying to find your place. The adolescent who is perfectly adjusted to his environment, I've yet to meet. ~ Roger Bannister

Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceilingone afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it. ~ Mary Blakely

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient. ~ Paul Beatty

Now, Sophia, would you care to tell me why you're here by the pond instead of reporting to your next class?'
'I'm experiencing some teenage angst, Mrs. Casnoff,' I answered. 'I need to, like, write in my journal or something. ~ Rachel Hawkins

I'm in my junior year but I can't take it anymore. The beige walls, the scent of linoleum and used lockers, the shrill bell between classes. High school is sucking the life out of me. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

The tallest adults are the ones who had the most childhood and adolescent growth before puberty started; puberty typically tacks on a standard nine inches, and then the game's over. "The children who are going to be the biggest adults are those who are tall by age one or two, and have a relatively late puberty," says Rosenfeld. ~ Arianne Cohen

I recognized it immediately the first time it happened - the cackle of the crone. It is the sound of a woman who is caught inside the mystery of the universe, in the irony of the angst, in the place ego abhors. Bliss. ~ Toni Bentley

Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent
anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked,
rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical,
monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic,
blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have
/nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our
own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this
day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!! ~ Mark Leyner

I knew I was high maintenance and he was obviously going to be the same ~ Sylvia Day

A disastrous flaw in our design is that the heart always defies the brain. ~ Piper Payne

The best gardener is a baby killer. Baby insects are much easier to kill than adults, and haven't yet developed the big mouths and voracious appetite of the adolescent. ~ Janet Macunovich

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. ~ Pauline Kael

I see no need in taking part in forced adolescent social rituals that would do nothing but stir up emotions of dread for all involved. ~ Jennifer Mathieu

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive. ~ Jessica Valenti

He is in love with you. I read the fucking letters. And you love him. Damn you! Damn you to hell, Elysse!" he roared, towering over the foot of the bed. "You are supposed to love me!"

-Alexis de Warenne ~ Brenda Joyce

Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone
exhausting themselves, miserably hemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no
longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. (Hmm. Though must admit, pretty bloody pleased to have new handbag.) What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six
weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then
fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? ~ Helen Fielding

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Why does it hurt so much? Why does it have to hurt? ~ Zoe Marriott

He couldn't remember having been seventeen; it was something that must have happened to him while he was busy. But it made him feel like he imagined it felt like when you were seventeen, which was like having a permanent red-hot vest on under your skin. ~ Terry Pratchett

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst. ~ Gregory Crewdson

Well, everyone's crazy these days, Dr. Singh. Adolescent sanity is so twentieth century. ~ John Green

I was, like, this token teen angst child of Broadway. It's so funny. What is that? I don't even know. But I loved it. ~ Jennifer Damiano

If you needed revenge, you've got it. Every minute that I'm with you knowing that you're not mine is like hydrochloric acid in a razor cut. ~ Connie Bailey

Death lived in a black world, where nothing was alive and everything was dark and his great library only had dust and cobwebs because he'd created them for effect and there was never any sun in the sky and the air never moved and he had an umbrella stand. And a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes by his bed. He wanted to be something more than just a bony apparition. He tried to create these flashes of personality but somehow they betrayed themselves, they tried too hard, like an adolescent boy going out wearing an after-shave called Rampant. ~ Terry Pratchett

If you can find happiness inside of you, nothing will be able to create angst in your mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

Now that you've had other men to use as a basis for comparison,how do I rate?" he teased.
"That's an adolescent question," Lauren retorted scornfully. ~ Judith McNaught

I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit. ~ Sarah Winman

My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst. ~ Mark Billingham

I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife ~ Colin Thubron

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do. ~ Jonathan Franzen

When I feel myself slipping to the darkness of my past, I'll close my eyes and remember this. Remember Jackson. ~ Stacey Trombley

I'd say I needed to find myself, if that didn't sound like I was heading into the Himalayas, taking only a backpack stuffed with angst and clean underwear. ~ Kelley Armstrong

She was in his head, in his damn bones-an addiction he never wanted to get over… ~ Katie Reus

Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ... ~ Patti Smith

Somehow, getting closer than humanly possible drove us further apart than we've ever been. ~ Lisa Desrochers

Finally told her son the gruesome truth about his life. I could have told them about the feeling of not knowing your roots, and about the angst you suffer when you discover you will be forever denied access to it. It's a feeling we know better than anyone else. ~ Erik Valeur

I'm too old to be your adolescent experiment."
Rory called back, "I'm too old to be an experimenting adolescent."
Drawn Together ~ Z.A. Maxfield

I was in the car with Trace and heard his side of the conversation with you. Sounded clear enough to me."
"Apparently not, cuz I'm not sweet on her. What kind of dumb-ass thing is that to say? I like her, sure, even though she's not the easiest lady to be around."
"No?"
Jackson didn't seem to hear her. He continued on as he pulled food from the tiny fridge and piled it on the counter. "She has her reasons for being prickly, and I know it."
"Those reasons are?"
"And there isn't a man alive who wouldn't want her. She's about the sexiest thing I've ever seen." He shook his head. "But I'm not sweet> about anything." He scoffed. "That sounds like some adolescent bullshit or something."
"You have a very limited vocabulary."
"My balls still hurt. It's affecting my brain."
"Your brain is located a little low, isn't it?"
He paused, then laughed. Shaking a loaf of bread at her, he said, "Good one. I'll have to try to remember this sharp wit of yours. ~ Lori Foster

One of our great problems today is that we have gotten caught up in our culture-wide quest for authenticity. We want our jeans authentic (pre-ripped at the factory), we want our apples authentic (grown locally instead of somewhere else), we want our music authentic (underground bands nobody ever heard of), we want our lettuce authentic (organically manured), we want our literature authentic (full of angst), we want our movies authentic (subtitles), and we want our coffee tables authentic (purchased from a genuine peasant while we were on some eco-tour). In short, we are a bunch of phonies. We are superficial all the way down. ~ Douglas Wilson

Why is it women have to bring all this angst into sex? We should be more like men. In. Out. Over. Next. ~ Lara Rios