Sixteen Quotes

Ronda, you know why a guy in his twenties goes after sixteen-year-old girls? Because they're dumb enough to believe his bullshit. ~ Ronda Rousey

When one is a god, the world hangs on your every word. When one is sixteen…not so much. ~ Rick Riordan

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples. ~ Philip Ball

But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; ~ Salman Rushdie

Designer Marc Jacobs ended his sixteen-year tenure at Louis Vuitton with a spring 2014 collection that celebrated fashion in its purest and least complicated form - as majestic, superficial beauty. ~ Robin Givhan

I've learned in my sixteen and a half years that there are things that will surprise you because you don't see them coming. They can be hard, painful things, and it's those ones that will live with you forever, bound to you soul in layers that grow thicker each year. Hopefully those layers will eventually dull the pain. ~ Juliana Stone

At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I was unhappy there and going through a rough transition, so I was desperate for any friend I could find that I could talk to. I thought that's what he was. We had this secret from my mom, who I didn't like much at the time. It was a harmless secret, so I didn't feel bad about it. All we did was go to the movies and hang out doing fun things all day. It wasn't until much later that the warning signs began, but I was still too young and stupid to see them for what they were at the time. Basically, he was patient as he built up the trust between us. He became a close friend and convinced me that he was on my side somehow. He took total advantage of my ignorance and totally betrayed me a few years later, when he slept with me. After my mom found out, she went psychotic and all she gave a fuck about was what had been done to her. She didn't care about anything except for how hurt she was by what had happened. She blamed me and him equally, telling me that sixteen years old was old enough to know better. Even though I never initiated a goddamn thing with him, and never would have. Even though it happened in the apartment she and I had gotten together, that he was not supposed to be staying in. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

The good news was that he wasn't sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son's fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight's success... well, then they'd be fine.
Mrs. Raje had been more impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ's card into his wallet.
Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ's crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob.
The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.
It was DJ's greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep. ~ Sonali Dev

I had to come out to my mother three times over a twelve-year period, but I first came out to her when I was sixteen. It didn't go over so well, because I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. It was a very strict environment. She has since done a lot of work and has really blown my mind. She has learned about my life and has changed her mind. ~ Billy Porter

When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys. ~ Erma Bombeck

We recorded our first CD, Sixteen Stone, with a small budget and never dreamed that we would enjoy such a high success. It was simply fantastic. ~ Gavin Rossdale

Females between sixteen and twenty-four years old face a higher risk of being sexually assaulted than any other age group. Most victims of campus rape are preyed upon when they are in their first or second year of college, usually by someone they know. And it's during the initial days and weeks of a student's freshman year, when she is in the midst of negotiating the fraught transition from girlhood to womanhood, that she is probably in the greatest danger. ~ Jon Krakauer

Because in addition to joining dangerous gangs and having parties, this Noah also goes out with girls, keeps his hair buzzed and tidy, hangs at The Spot, watches sports with Dad. For all other sixteen-year-old boys: fine. For Noah, it signifies one thing: death of the spirit. A book with the wrong story in it. ~ Jandy Nelson

If you're trying to be miserable, it's important you don't have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don't read anything informative, don't listen to anything useful, don't do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind. ~ John Bytheway

I was sixteen, not three. I was old enough to make my own decisions. Try explaining that to my mom, though. ~ Courtney Rene

She squared her shoulders against his charms. "It depends on who kisses me. I highly suspect a kiss from you would instantly void sixteen years of savings."
"What good are savings if you never spend them? ~ Anne Fortier

When I was fifteen or sixteen I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's 'Republic', front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say... I didn't know what exactly.

from: 'The Examined Life, Philosophical Meditations ~ Robert Nozick

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. ~ Jessica Khoury

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones. ~ Colum McCann

The longest I have ever gone without sex is sixteen years. But to my credit, elementary and middle school were rough dating years. ~ Jarod Kintz

I have often perplexed myself over what I saw in Nelle Snyder's aged face at that moment. It was no look of paranoia. It was a look of waiting. Perpetual waiting. That look was to come back to me sixteen years later when I heard Rose's narration at the end of James Cameron's Titanic, with its line about survivors "waiting for an absolution that never came." Yet the waiting I saw in Nelle Snyder's face seemed larger even than a waiting for absolution. It seemed vaster even than Titanic herself. Call it the waiting of the Mother of all Perished Vessels. Or of a Ship of Honeymoon Dreams perchance, with a passenger list spanning all humanity, that once proudly sailed but was lost, aeons ago, and sank to a dark, unreachable abode where nothing whatsoever can be grasped about her except her perplexing power still to haunt us. ~ James Glaeg

First you shoot me," he muttered. "Now you're handin' me your damn club and spoutin' love poems." "She was sixteen, motherfucker, you woulda shot you." "No, asshole, I woulda killed me." At that, Preacher just kept grinning. Jesus, was he in the twilight zone? ~ Madeline Sheehan

A life isn't measured in hours or minutes. Its the quality not the length. All things considered I've been luckier than most. Almost sixteen years on Earth, and I've already had eight good ones here. I expect to have eight more before all's good said and done. Nearly thirty-two years total, and that's not too shabby ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.
'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'
Having written this, she laughed.
She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.
("After The Theatre") ~ Anton Chekhov

Oysters are the only food that never causes indigestion. Indeed, a man would have to eat sixteen dozen of these acephalous molluscs in order to gain the 315 grammes of nitrogen he requires daily. ~ Jules Verne

For me… it was excruciating." He closed his eyes for a moment then focused on her. "It is so painful to truly love someone so much and not have them. For years I practiced tolerating that pain. Around the time I was sixteen I could finally stand to look at you. So, I did, all the damn time. I watched you so carefully. I captured every smile, every frown, every tear from you. I wanted you… but I couldn't have you. Then one day we became friends and
the pain came back, but I didn't care because you were my friend, my best friend. But when you kissed me, I realized the feeling I had before was nothing compared to what I felt when we kissed. I felt alive… and guilty and betrayed, because it's not fair. It's not fair for me to go through that… to want to kiss you every day, every hour, every minute for the rest of my miserable life, but I want to. I'm afraid that it will get to a point where I need to. I have been in love with you since I was eight years old. I have hated the way my father has treated me, but nothing has hurt me as much as the pain of my mother's death except seeing you and my brother in bliss. What I want is for you to stay in this room with me. I want to feel how you feel, taste how you taste, and completely fall in you because I'm just… tired of always wanting what I can't have. I want to make you smile, make you happy… I want to be inside you… I want to give you pleasure in every way… mind, body, and soul… I am completely, madly… and utterly in love with ~ Chelsea Ballinger

Simon had shamelessly tried to curry favor with Isabelle's father by teaching Robert Lightwood how to use Simon's digital watch as a timer. Robert was now holding the watch in a death grip and studying it carefully. It would be Robert's turn with the baby again in sixteen minutes, and he had clasped Simon's shoulder and said, "Thanks, son," which Simon took as a blessing to date Robert's daughter. ~ Cassandra Clare

Your parents met at twenty; we met at--"
"Twelve," I supply.
Peter frowns, annoyed that I've messed up his argument. "Okay, so we met when were kids, but we didn't get together until we were seventeen--"
"I was sixteen."
"We didn't get together for real until we were both basically seventeen. Which is basically the same thing as eighteen, which is basically the same thing as twenty." He has the self-satisfied look of a lawyer who has just delivered a winning closing statement.
"That's a very long and twisty line of logic," I say. "Have you ever thought about being a lawyer?"
"No, but now I'm thinking maybe? ~ Jenny Han

I've been singing properly every day since I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I have never had any problems with my voice, ever. I've had a sore throat here and there, had a cold and sung through it, but that day it just went while I was onstage in Paris during a radio show. It was literally like someone had pulled a curtain over it. ~ Adele

What a sad and frightening time it was. Thousands of firefighters and other rescue workers swarmed the sixteen-acre disaster zone, searching for survivors. The area, which became known as Ground Zero, was extremely dangerous. Underground fires smoldered, and the smoke was a toxic mix of melted plastic, steel, lead, and many poisonous chemicals. Few of the rescue workers had on proper protective clothing or masks. And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the ~ Lauren Tarshis

Already at the age of sixteen I wondered at them gloomily; I was amazed at the pettiness of their minds, the stupidity of their activities, games, and conversations. They were so lacking in understanding of the most essential things, so devoid of interest in the most important, most remarkable matters, that I involuntarily began to look upon them as my inferiors. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I was like sixteen, I was a total chick I had big hair. I was seen as this attractive girl, and I would get all this attention. And then I just cut off my hair, and I quit playing that game. ~ Ani DiFranco

At five that night, I went back to the market and bought three sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked a joint, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Into the Mystic" ten times, drank the third Ale, too the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy thoughts. One was it was only seven o'clock. The second was that I was wide awake. ~ Anne Lamott

During its sixteen years in the field, it achieved a series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years. Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire. Gestalt is tough. ~ Daniel O'Malley

Hope, though; now there's a real pest. Hope doesn't just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there's a nice job in your brother-in-law's tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there's no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you're miserable and in pain, but Hope won't let you go. She's a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I've made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there's nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.

Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn't go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn't going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy'll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn't really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a f ~ K.J. Parker

My mom said I wasn't allowed to date until I was sixteen, but I broke that rule. She found out and said, 'I'm disappointed in you.' ~ Justin Bieber

We're living in a funny time right now, when people build restaurant-grade kitchens in their homes, and if you walk into a specialty cooking store, it seems like you need sixteen gadgets and a graduate degree to make a meal. At the same time, other people live entirely on takeout, frozen food, and energy bars that don't resemble anything close to food. I think there's a middle ground worth finding between those two extremes, where we feed ourselves and the people we love with our hands and without a lot of tricks and fanfare. ~ Shauna Niequist

That works for now." Eve's stomach began to clench and jitter. There were tears swimming in her aide's eyes. Peabody's lips were quivering. "What are you doing?" she demanded.
"Nothing. Sir."
"How come you're going to cry? You know how I feel about crying on the job."
"I'm not crying." And it appalled her that she was on the edge of it. "I just don't feel very well, that's all. I wonder, sir, if I could be excused from the briefing at sixteen hundred. ~ J.D. Robb

WHEN I finally slowed and looked around, I saw with amazement I'd trotted sixteen blocks in about three minutes. Summer Olympics, here I come. Assuming they held the races at night. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy. ~ J.D. Salinger

The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten, four, three; they are motionless and they change places; they come and go, bound into the street, are suddenly swallowed up by the sunshine, then come back and sit before you, like persistent symbols of universal vibration. ~ Umberto Boccioni (Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto)

Some of the choices teenagers make are morally and practically wrong. Some of my characters do things I hope my child won't. There are occasionally words my characters choose that I wouldn't utter in my mother's presence. But when I was sixteen, or twelve, hanging out with my friends? That was different. For a story to feel real, I have to respect what a character would really do or say. ~ Rachel Vail

Today I have gathered together my nearest and dearest, my sixteen nieces and nephews (Sit down, Grace Windsor Wexler!) to view the body of your Uncle Sam for the last time. Tomorrow its ashes will be scattered to the four winds. I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me–by one of you! ~ Ellen Raskin

Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. ~ Anna Funder

How that is so I don't know. How Mama and Daddy know me sixteen years and hate me, how a stranger meet me and love me. (131) ~ Sapphire.

Gansey had no idea how old Blue was. He knew she'd just finished eleventh grade. Maybe she was sixteen. Maybe she was eighteen. Maybe she was twenty-two and just very short and remedial. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

For her teenage daughter, though, those years didn't go so well. She had always told Stry, "I'm not going to turn out like you," and then that's exactly how she did turn out: pregnant at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, living with her own baby boy in a group home for teenage mothers, just like the one she had lived in as a baby girl sixteen years earlier. ~ Paul Tough

I can still remember what I was like when I was sixteen. It was hell to be that excited. Then as now, orgasms gave no relief. Ten minutes after an orgasm, guess what? Nothing would do but that you have another one. And there was homework besides! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate. ~ Margaret Mitchell

I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle. ~ Jonathan Ames

I'll say this again: Her presence would be the best Mother's Day gift I could ever ask for. I know Kate Siegel a big bestselling author now, but I was sliced, no, ripped open from my boobs down to my baby cannon to bring her into this world, all but bathed in her puke for years, and acted as her own personal chauffeur for the first sixteen years of her life. ~ Kate Siegel

Those eyes, they've got a history with mine. They were the first things I saw when I came to, after being hit in the skull with a baseball thrown by Patrick at Little League. They were the fortification I needed at sixteen to ride the chairlift at Sugarloaf, although I am terrified of heights. For almost my whole life, they've told me I'm doing all right, during moments when it was not in my own power to answer. ~ Jodi Picoult

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women.

In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals.

This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in ~ Susan Shapiro Barash

I laughed. "You're too young to be so ... pessimistic," I said, using the English word.
"Pessi-what?"
"Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things."
"Pessimistic ... pessimistic ... " She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. "I'm only sixteen," she said, "and I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots. ~ Haruki Murakami

Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future. ~ Mary Doria Russell

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy.
Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday. ~ Kate Morton

The citizens of the Capitol have been drooling over him ever since. Because of his youth, they couldn't really touch him for the first year or two. But ever since he turned sixteen, he's spent his time at the Games being dogged by those desperately in love with him. No one retains his favour for long. He can go through four or five in his annual visit. Old or young, lovely or plain, rich or very rich, he'll keep them company and take their extravagant gifts, but he never stays, and once he's gone he never comes back. ~ Suzanne Collins

We were talking about The Bell Jar, because we were sixteen, and we wanted to be depressed in New York. ~ Deborah Willis

Yes, I had turned a deaf ear to my girlhood with my silence. It was a time when I was unable to love myself, so I had to go from fifteen straight to twenty. Whether I started walking out of my past or walked into it from the present, my footprints always came to a stop in the same place. I would go from being fifteen to twenty, or go from being twenty to fifteen, If I set out from the past, I had to ignore sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and skip straight to twenty. If I set out from the present, I had to ignore nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and skip straight to fifteen. Those years always remained vacant, like naked sunlight, like the well with its bottom completely covered. ~ Shin Kyung-sook

Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase. ~ Robert Galbraith

the journey of going from 'I' to 'We'. "When two indigenous Quechuans meet sixteen thousand feet atop a mountain in Peru for the first time, often they set a challenge. Let's say the challenge is a race. In their society, whoever wins the race is duty bound to coach the loser until he has attained a similar competency. In return, the loser teaches the victor a new skill. This interdependence helps both people. Both win, as does society. Ayni, the art of reciprocation, ensures that their society as a whole grows together. ~ Kevin Kelly

Stop saying that! You sound absurd, and I don't even think you mean it. Besides, I'd never marry you," I told him. "I'm sixteen, and you're a slut, and you can't stop saying preposterous things!"
"True," he admitted. He kissed me on the lips and then I closed the door. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Sixteen, I reflected, biting into a stolen pie. By this time in her life, my sister Mary had been pregnant. Ovid had dedicated his life to poetry. Queen Elizabeth had seen a suitor beheaded. Romeo and Juliet were dead. Whereas I, Margaret Lucas, was nothing if not in health, no single true adventure to my name. ~ Danielle Dutton

Sixteen million colors in your palette are hard for any artist, especially a beginner, to turn down. ~ Buffy Sainte-Marie

It is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity nowadays, which you cannot declare positively unsound - but which, nevertheless, is not full measure, good weight and sixteen ounces to the pound. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably "something about Christ, and something about grace, and something about faith, and something about repentance, and something about holiness," but it is not the real "thing as it is" in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion. As old Latimer would have said, it is a kind of "mingle-mangle," and does no good. It neither . . . exercises influence on daily conduct, nor comforts in life, nor gives peace in death. And those who hold it often awake too late to find that they have got nothing solid under their feet. ~ J.C. Ryle

Anyways, it made me think. Who the hell cares if Michael Phelps can swim across a pool at like warp speed? Or that some sixteen-year-old waif can spell the entire Chinese alphabet with a stupid ribbon on a stick above her head? You know who's holding this world together and leaping buildings in a single bound every day? Moms, that's who. ~ Karen Alpert

I tried to imagine how things could get much worse. The gods were in the Midwest fighting a huge monster that had almost defeated them once before. Poseidon was under siege and losing a war against the sea Titan Oceanus.
Kronos was still out there somewhere. Olympus was virtually undefended. The demigods of Camp Half-Blood were on our own with a spy in our midst.
Oh, and according to the ancient prophecy, I was going to die when I turned sixteen - which happened to be in five days, the exact same time Typhon was supposed to hit New York. Almost forgot that. ~ Rick Riordan

Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana's campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing "good sex." "Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm," Herbenick said. "Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men."

The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it's become disproportionately common in porn - and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List - it's also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it's up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old - and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is? - found that it was mainly boys ~ Peggy Orenstein

You may adore Love You Forever, but I hear it as a story about an overbearing and smothering mother who infantilizes her son and can only tell him she loves him when he is fast asleep. I also contend that she drugs his cocoa. And that when the man's baby daughter wakes up sixteen years later and finds him fondling her in her room, she will be calling 911 and going into therapy. ~ Jane Yolen

I made more money yesterday than I ever thought I'd make in an entire lifetime. But it's like somebody's going to take it all away from me and I'll be back in Texas, installing them damned irrigation wells. I didn't like that when I was sixteen. And I know I wouldn't like it when I'm eighty. ~ Jimmy Dean

You don't get it. They gave me beauty and song, and then I was left in the woods to grow up for sixteen years before being handed over to you. I don't know anything about ruling. I don't even really know what taxes are. I was in the woods in the real world. In the dreamworld, I hid like a mouse and then organized balls and parties. ~ Liz Braswell

Madness--that's all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane. ~ J.G. Ballard

You're no longer sixteen, acushla. If I want to take you down to the floor and peel you out of those jeans and taste what secrets you have hidden between your legs, I will. So either tell me that's what you've come for or get the fuck out of my pub. ~ V. Theia

When I was sixteen I started acting, and I also started to embrace my tradition and culture. I had a young medicine man interpret for me what it is to be an Indian. He really caught me at a good time because I was really vulnerable after the loss of my parents with all of the feelings of abandonment. ~ Adam Beach

At sixteen
I though
Iwould've made it
by now.

Now
I'm making up
what making it
means
as i go. ~ Jason Reynolds

I got the idea for 'Throne of Glass' when I was sixteen. Music always inspires my books, and when I was listening to the 'Cinderella' soundtrack, I thought, 'What if Cinderella was actually an assassin who liked getting dressed up all pretty and going to the ball, but then she wouldn't mind kicking butt?' ~ Sarah J. Maas

Ever since I was a kid, I was always a fan of hip hop. If you get your limelight whether your sixteen or twenty-one or wherever you're at, you get your lime when you get your lime, but if you're a part of hip hop and a child of hip hop, then you will always be a part of hip hop. ~ Lil' Mama

It was you,' I said, my words as new and uncertain as a baby's. I was sixteen and in my bedroom, and I shook my head in an attempt to unscramble my thoughts. 'Not the tongue. The fire.'
I shut my eyes, then opened them to make sure I hadn't made this thing up.
[ ... ]
But Christian hadn't taken his eyes off me, and in his expression I saw a slew of emotions: shame, defiance, fury. Fear, but not for himself. For me. I saw my big brother, who carried me off the ledge at Suicide Rock when I froze up. [ ... ] Who thought I was a fool and had no problem telling me so, but who stuck up for me anyway. ~ Lauren Myracle

I might as well have offered up my vagina to the Museum of Natural History. Surely, it would be shown in the fossils display. I could already picture it, right beside Tyrannosaurus Rex's teeth. The Last Virginal Vagina in New York. Georgia Cummings 1990-2080 Died happily in her Chelsea apartment, surrounded by all sixteen of her tabby cats. ~ Max Monroe

Take a trip in my mind
see all that I've seen,
and you'd be called a
beast, not a human being ...
Fuck it, cause there's
not much I can do,
there's no way out, my
screams have no voice no
matter how loud I shout ...
I could be called a
low life, but life ain't
as low as me. I'm
in juvenile hall headed
for the penitentiary.
George Trevino, sixteen, Who Am I? ~ Edward Humes

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

Did I think he was "the one?" Iʼll never know. At sixteen, everyone is "the one. ~ K.A. Tucker

I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar. ~ Samantha Shannon

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. ~ Tennessee Ernie Ford

If you want to succeed in your life, remember this phrase: That past does not equal the future. Because you failed yesterday; or all day today; or a moment ago; or for the last six months; the last sixteen years; or the last fifty years of life, doesn't mean anything ... All that matters is: What are you going to do, right now? ~ Tony Robbins

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories a ~ Jeanine Cummins

Yeah, about sixteen to twenty weeks a year. For example, we can do America in six or seven weeks. You can do Europe in three weeks; England in two weeks. South America you could do in three weeks; Asia you could do in three weeks. ~ Warren Cuccurullo

Here's what I know about Cole," Jeremy said. Punctuated by the silence, it sounded like he was in a pulpit. "Cole's religion is debunking the impossible. He doesn't believe in impossible. He doesn't believe in no. Cole's religion is waiting for someone to tell him it can't be done so he can do it. Anything. Doesn't matter what that something is, so long as it can't be done. Here's an origin story for you. In the beginning of time there was an ocean and a void, and God made the ocean into the world and he made the void into Cole."

Victor laughed.

"I thought you said you were a Buddhist," Jan said.

"Part-time," Jeremy replied.

Debunking the impossible.

Now, the pines stretched up so high on either side of the road that it felt like I was tunneling to the middle of the world. Mercy Falls was an unnumbered stretch of miles behind me.

I was sixteen again, and the road unwound in front of me, endless possibilities. I felt wiped clean, empty, forgiven. I could drive forever, anywhere. I could be anyone. But I felt the pull of Boundary Wood around me and, for once, the business of being Cole St. Clair no longer felt like such a curse. I had a purpose, a goal, and it was the impossible: finding a cure.

I was so close. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined. ~ Gene Baur

Right now, I'd be happy to find whatever it was and let it pull me into his den away from Penthouse page sixteen up there. ~ Heather Dahlgren

Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times - something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahotomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. ~ Matthew Walker

I want to marry you, because you're my best friend. I want to marry you, because I love waking up beside you. I want to marry you, because I love seeing you strut around in my shirts. I want to marry you, because I love having you in my house, in my space and I love knowing you've been there and that you're coming back. I want to marry you, because without you my life feels incomplete." He paused, taking a deep breath. "But most importantly, I want to marry you because I love you - I have since I was sixteen years old - and I'll never stop. ~ Micalea Smeltzer

Daddy!" Eva whirled around, glaring. "I've been fucking Deuce since I was eighteen! I wanted to fuck him when I was sixteen! Maybe I even wanted him when I was twelve too! Who knows! What I do know is I have been in love with him since I was five! So get over it! And don't you dare shoot him or I'll shoot you! ~ Madeline Sheehan

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.' ~ C.S. Lewis

Once in a lifetime, if we're lucky, a Sixteen-String Jack Rann crosses our paths, and if we're really lucky he or she becomes a friend. You'll know them because even though they may be scoundrels they affect all those around them positively. They will be larger than life characters who will draw people to them without any intentional effort whatsoever. And they'll make people smile. ~ Karl Wiggins

In fact, her whole life, she'd done her absolute best to do the right thing. It was wonderful to be wildly, romantically in love at sixteen. But life wasn't romantic ~ Jennifer Greene

I did not write love songs as a sixteen-year-old. I did not write about crushes or about mean girls. I wrote about my life - about the injustices and inequities and the search for answers and self-responsibility. ~ Jewel

In my sixteen years, I have experienced heartbreak, tragedy and transcending love. In my thirteenth year, I moved to Westerly and experienced all three. ~ Jaycee Relic

He kept grinning. "Told the guys. They're pretty happy about the new shit that's coming." "Of course they are," I returned. "It's a sixty inch TV. A woman is happy with six inches. For a man to get happy, it has to be sixty." He burst out laughing. "Do I speak truth?" I asked. His brows shot up. "You'd be happy with six inches?" "I was happy with less than that for sixteen years so I guess the answer is yes." He kept laughing but started doing it so hard the bed shook. ~ Kristen Ashley