Young Adults Quotes

Millennials in the workplace have been called "orchids"2 (can't survive outside the greenhouse) and "teacups"3 (chip easily and then are ruined), but to me the most prescient metaphor for young adults sent out into the world after being overparented is "veal" - a term coined by Massachusetts educator Joe Maruszczak - meaning they're raised in controlled environments and led, metaphorically, to slaughter. None of us took a course called "how to hold your kid back," but overparenting appears to be seriously poor preparation for life in the work world. In 2014, interested ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

Chris Salamone has create and develop educational and leadership development programs for our nation's youth and
young adults that have provided many opportunities for students to grow and develop. ~ Chris Salamone

My ultimate authority would be the school librarian Mrs. Greenbacher. ~ Shawn Stewart Ruff

Adjusting herself, she doesn't feel any different. Not really. And now what? Is she supposed to go back to Ben? Are they going to do it again? Was she good? Was he good? Who defines 'good' anyway? Is he going to tell everyone? What will he tell them? ~ Ann Benjamin

I believe in good and evil," said Jem. "And I believe the soul is eternal. But I don't believe in the fiery pit, the pitchforks, or endless torment. I do not believe you can threaten people into goodness."
Tessa looked at will. "What about you? What do you believe?
"Pulvis et umbra sumus," said Will, not looking at her as he spoke. "I believe we are dust and shadows. What else is there? ~ Cassandra Clare

There are storm clouds before the storm, there are the living before the dead. I need a figurehead, a banner bearer who will announce my arrival to the world. ~ Kevin Outlaw

After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults. ~ Rodman Philbrick

We are all entitled to our own share of mistakes and learning experiences in life. No one should take them away from us. Not even our parents. ~ Lukasz Laniecki

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: ~ Diana Wynne Jones

"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and
actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it - and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit. ~ Dan Gillmor

Parents are never forgiven for not giving just the right response at the appropriate moment. Or, rather, there are particular times in the adolescent's or young adult's life, when a certain response is needed, and this need is not met, and the failure to meet this need is forever remembered, and is never forgiven. ~ Terri E Apter

Knowledgeable observers report that dating has nearly disappeared from college campuses and among young adults generally. It has been replaced by something called "hanging out." You young people apparently know what this is, but I will describe it for the benefit of those of us who are middle-aged or older and otherwise uninformed. Hanging out consists of numbers of young men and young women joining together in some group activity. It is very different from dating.
For the benefit of some of you who are not middle-aged or older, I also may need to describe what dating is. Unlike hanging out, dating is not a team sport. Dating is pairing off to experience the kind of one-on-one association and temporary commitment that can lead to marriage in some rare and treasured cases. . . .

All of this made dating more difficult. And the more elaborate and expensive the date, the fewer the dates. As dates become fewer and more elaborate, this seems to create an expectation that a date implies seriousness or continuing commitment. That expectation discourages dating even more. . . .

Simple and more frequent dates allow both men and women to "shop around" in a way that allows extensive evaluation of the prospects. The old-fashioned date was a wonderful way to get acquainted with a member of the opposite sex. It encouraged conversation. It allowed you to see how you treat others and how you are treated in a one-on-one situation. It gave opportunities to learn how t ~ Dallin H. Oaks

sometimes a little crazy is all you need ~ Libba Bray

My grandmother was also an active member of the tenants association and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, and both of my parents were extremely liberal, so I think I grew up in a household that was very politically conscious - we all watched the elections on TV, and we watched the debates. So it was an awareness that we were raised with, and as we grew into young adults, we just naturally became politically active. It was just understood that it was important, that it was our responsibility. ~ Scarlett Johansson

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

Don't take on more student loans than your future-self can handle. ~ Carol H. Cox

How initially 'to get her in the sack' and subsequently to avoid 'her giving you the sack' are not identical dilemmas faced by the male species, but they sure have a bizarre habit of being bedfellows ~ Alex Morritt

We are in a time, because of the proliferation of online media and a hundred channels on cable, where teenagers and young adults and eight- and nine-year-olds do not read enough. And the SAT is very unforgiving for students who do not read. ~ Jonathan Grayer

As a mother, anything to do with my children, whether it's supporting their school or programs that support their education and enrichment. As a wife, anything that my husband is passionate about and helps to support. As a community member, anything that supports the Vail Valley, the place that I call home. As a friend of the founder and true believer in their mission, an organization called First Descents. They provide adventure camps to young adults and adults with cancer or who have survived cancer. ~ Trista Sutter

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_. ~ Edward Abbey

I'm grateful for my children, who are slowly emerging to become their own wonderful, interesting, compassionate young adults - which makes me believe that along the way I must have done something right. ~ Jodi Picoult

I tend to not use the word "socialist," because even though more young adults in the United States in a poll say they support socialism than do capitalism, the word socialism doesn't have a lot of meaning in this country. ~ Cynthia Kauffman

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults. ~ Alison Bechdel

The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV] ... in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders. ~ Joel Salatin

I'm an active and involved senator. It's very difficult to do the job I want to do and spend as much time as I want with my kids ... It is time for me to be a father first to them, and I realize as I watch them grow and become young adults that I won't be able to get this time back. ~ Robert J. Garagiola

[Young] adults who take gap years tended to be less motivated than their peers before the gap year. But after their gap year, most of them find new motivation. They had higher performance outcomes, career choice formation, improved employability, and a variety of life skills. The gap year can be seen as an educational process in which skills and critical reflection contribute to an individual's development. ~ Rich Karlgaard

I know that I'll be writing for young adults for a long time. Mostly because I just love the readers and the teachers and librarians that I interact with. ~ Veronica Roth

I write books for young adults because I truly connect with them on some very deep level. They are our hope, our future, and inspiring them to be the best they can be is very important to me. ~ Ellen Hopkins

There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills. ~ John T. Cacioppo

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twenty-somethings feeling naïve, even devastated.Twenty-somethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas, making it more difficult for twenty-somethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twenty-somethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twenty-somethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation. ~ Meg Jay

I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

As I lay in bed trying to figure out the tangle I had gotten myself into, I realised temptation struck human beings in different forms. In the form of chocolates for children, drugs for young adults, bribe money for people in influential positions, and sometimes in the form of lust –like the kind I had been struck with. Human beings succumbed to this temptation despite knowing too well that they would suffer the consequences days, weeks, months or even years later. ~ Jagdish Joghee

With the 'Hazelwood High' trilogy, I wasn't sure I was writing a trilogy. I would just write one book, then another, and then another, because the young adults who wrote me told me that they wanted to read more. ~ Sharon Draper

Too many people glorified small-town America, making it seems like a Normal Rockwell painting, but the reality was something else entirely. With the exception of doctors and lawyers or people who owned their own business, there were no high-paying jobs in Oriental, or any other small town for that matter. And while is was in many way an ideal place to raise young children, there was little for young adults to aspire to.There weren't, nor would there ever be, middle management positions in small towns, nor was there much to do on the weekends, or even new people to meet ~ Nicholas Sparks

I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults. ~ Candace Bushnell

Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With 'Twilight,' they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They're very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

Studies indicate that most of young adults struggle to grasp even the most basic financial principles that will allow them to manage money and prepare for their future. ~ Ron Lewis

We're doing it wrong, absolutely wrong! Miss Universe should be about Space Exploration, Miss World about Science and Miss Earth about Going Green! ~ Manasa Rao

First, singles can't learn everything from singles. Duh. Nor can young adults learn everything from other young adults. To think that we're an island unto ourselves and can operate healthily under that construct is both arrogant and misguided. For one thing, we just don't know enough. We need older, seasoned believers to get up in our business and tell us what's what. We need to know where you've walked and what you've learned from the journey. ~ Lisa Anderson

So does this mean we're officially young adults now?" I asked her.
"I don't know. I've already been reading those kinds of books for a few years."
"Uh-oh, does this mean I'm still a baby? I really love EVERYONE POOPS. ~ Elizabeth Eulberg

Having worked as a clinician for almost 40 years, I have seen some young adults, who had the classic, clear and conspicuous signs of Asperger's syndrome in early childhood, achieve over decades a range of social abilities and improvements in behaviour such that the diagnostic characteristics became sub-clinical; that is, the person no longer has a clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important area of functioning. There may still be very subtle signs of Asperger's syndrome, but when the diagnostic tests are re-administered, the person achieves a score below the threshold to maintain the diagnosis. There is now longitudinal research that is starting to confirm clinical experience that about 10 per cent of those who originally had an accurate diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome in childhood no longer have sufficient impairments to justify the diagnosis (Cederlund et al. 2008; Farley et al. 2009). ~ Tony Attwood

Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millenia in response to all the different foods
mostly plants
they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young adults and children. [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille] ~ Barbara Kingsolver

People have a much greater chance of finding something they'll enjoy doing and making those greatest contributions when they trust themselves and are free to make their own life choices (are not marionettes in the hands of their parents). ~ Lukasz Laniecki

You two are children almost grown. Your hearts have not hardened to the realities of the world. Your dreams have not fallen through your fingers. You still know hope. ~ Laura Lam

Dear, he do have a problem. ~ Taylor Ann Bunker

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Between the key ages of fourteen and twenty-four, numerous Americans will form their views based on the popularity of the current president. A popular Republican or unpopular Democrat will influence many young adults to become Republicans. An unpopular Republican or popular Democrat puts this impressionable group in the Democratic column.

And those views, in these key years, will, on average, last a lifetime. ~ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation's highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7 ~ Mark Steyn

The incident does not mean that most Japanese were not appalled by Aum. It does suggest that many young adults viewed their society as so corrupt and hypocritical that any degree of mockery, if not violence against it, was justified. ~ Robert Jay Lifton

Young adults living with a stutter is hard work. How do they handle job interviews? What do they do when the phone rings? How do they 'chat someone up'? All these things the average person takes for granted prove to be a stammerer's biggest challenge. ~ Gareth Gates

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918. ~ Cat Winters

Parents like to think of themselves as Batmans, and of their children as Gotham Cities. Gotham City depends on Batman for its survival, and Batman delivers. This belief prevents parents from letting those young adults actually live their lives. ~ Lukasz Laniecki

I actually was rebelling as all young adults tend to do at or around the age of 19, to experiment with their lives and have fun. ~ Brian Bosworth

I see kids and young adults walking the streets of L.A. with this enormous sense of entitlement, who seem to think that if they are basically good people and pay their bills, then the world will be good back to them. And I think life isn't always like that. ~ Evangeline Lilly

When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life. ~ O.R. Melling

Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything. ~ Criss Jami

Why are young adults so self-centered and always seeking instant gratification? Because older adults, often in positions of power, paint them that way. ~ Raymond Arroyo

One person put it this way, 'If you want to get to know a Millennial, share a meal.' In other words, get to know them at an individual level. ~ David Kinnaman

William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved. ~ Meg Jay

Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."
Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro. ~ John Green

We all reach a point as young adults when we wonder what we should be doing with our lives - or, at the very least, which direction to point ourselves in. Beyond the means to get by, we need to think about what's most important to us. Not surprisingly, I discovered that for me the answer was family. ~ Saroo Brierley

I took care of young adults with cystic fibrosis when I was in my residency training and found this to be a disease that was desperately in need of some explanation. ~ Francis Collins

You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world. ~ Anthony Horowitz

I once led a church largely made up of young adults - twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, mostly. Many lamented that we weren't more multigenerational (you know, like the church), but at the same time the married young people wanted to be in a separate small group from the single young people because they didn't have anything in common with the singles. "You mean, besides Jesus?" I asked. ~ Jared C. Wilson

The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. ~ Daniel Kahneman

My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults, and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it, the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner. ~ Deborah Harkness

In our family, at this point,[Sunday School] its not a choice for my kids. It's a duty for us as parents to give them faith as a foundation and hope that when they bemuse older teens and young adults they will choose the same thing for themselves. ~ Gretchen Carlson

There was a time, from 1935-1946, when teenagers and young adults danced to jazz-orientated bands. When jazz orchestras dominated pop charts and when influential clarinettists were household names. This was the swing era. ~ Scott Yanow

I do not believe in public shaming. I do believe that young adults go to college to learn things, and that this process will almost inevitably result in their making mistakes and misjudgments and otherwise acting badly. ~ Gene Weingarten

I think young adults get a bad rap for being self-absorbed and self-centered. My experience going around the United States and speaking in schools is that teenagers here are very interested in the fate of their peers around the world. ~ Patricia McCormick

Make you life the greatest story told! ~ Marie Guillaume

Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It's time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world. ~ Dale Archer

Interview on The Skiffy and Fanty Show 2010. In response to query that young adults may not be open to the nuances/realism in Moorehawke:

'(In fact)young adult readers seem to (be very inclined)to reading the (Moorehawke) books thematically. Some (not all) adult reviewers ... tend to be very plot oriented. Because the books are a slow release of information and very character driven ... (they) don't reward impatient reading ... but young adults seem to be very patient readers. They're very analytical as well. I get very analytical responses from my young adult readers. ~ Celine Kiernan

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults. ~ Charles J. Shields

It seems [that] everybody wants to be a twenty-something except for many twenty-somethings themselves. All around, 'thirty is the new twenty' is starting to get a new reaction: 'God, I hope not. ~ Meg Jay

Cisco projects that in 2020, now just five years away, there will be seven billion people on the earth and 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. Six-and-a-half devices on average per person. As a father of five young adults and teenagers, I think we are - in my household, we've exceeded the 6.5 number. ~ James Comey

I'm not a grownup, just a kid who has been around for a while. ~ Millie Florence

For young adults,the growth from silly to serious can be very fast, indeed. ~ Dean Cumings

An approach, according to which children should fulfil their parents' dreams/ do everything in order to make their parents happy/ provide their parents with a peace of mind, or whatever they want for themselves - because they owe it to them for all those years in which their parents took care of them - is utterly selfish. ~ Lukasz Laniecki

the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. We've seen the same patterns repeated on three different sites, with different users and different experiences: men, women, free, subscription-only, casual, serious, "urban" demographics, and more "mainstream." All told, the research set represents a large chunk of the young adults in this country, and the data uniformly shows non-blacks discount African American profiles. It's not a problem caused by a small cluster of "ugly" black users or by a small group of unreformed racists throwing off an otherwise regular pattern. ~ Christian Rudder

takes many years for heart disease to develop. A 2007 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) study suggests that even adolescents and young adults show some of the warning signs for developing heart disease. Having a high body mass index (BMI) or higher than optimal blood pressure or LDL ("bad") cholesterol between ages 18 and 30 can mean a two to three times greater risk of developing heart disease. Regrettably, more and more adolescents and young adults are developing these signs because of poor diet and lack of physical activity. You can significantly lower your chances of heart disease by adopting the measures described below. ~ Miriam E. Nelson

When it comes to expanding opportunity, businesses and young adults are not the sources of the problem - they are a substantial part of the solution. ~ Gerald Chertavian

Some church-raised young adults experience similar self-doubt when it comes to making spiritual judgments. Instead of equipping them to make thoughtful, prayerful decisions and then to trust God for the outcome, the church has instilled a debilitating fear of sin or "stepping out of God's will." How can we expect the next generation to move forward with confidence into God's future when they are scared of making a misstep?1 ~ Lysa TerKeurst

Strong families serve society by bringing forth healthy children and maturing young adults, by being a rich source of a compassion for sick members, of support for others in time of crisis and of care for the elderly and the dying. ~ Vincent Nichols

If you're under 26, you can stay on your parents' plan. You can go back to school or get extra training without fear of a health catastrophe bankrupting your family. Over three million previously uninsured young adults are now on their parents' plans. ~ Kathleen Sebelius

As someone who has seen war first hand, and as a father of three young adults, it was my hope that we could have resolved this conflict and disarmed Saddam Hussein without war. However, this was not the case. ~ Allen Boyd

They (parents) use this guilt-tripping to stop you from fulfilling your plans, but most important, from believing something they don't (something which contradicts their beliefs) ~ Lukasz Laniecki

We can't know what's going to happen. We can just try to figure it out as we go along.
- Roger Sullivan ~ Morgan Matson

TRUTH: When a child believes he must win to be worthy, when young adults define themselves by what they do and not who they are, it is a kind of slavery a slave master would envy. ~ Tom Shadyac

[In reference to vaginas] Someone saying you're "too loose"? Maybe that person's previous experience has been with women who weren't aroused (which, in the case of young adults, ins't that unusual) ... Since many people think that penetration is supposed to be painful at first, a lot of them don't know how to wait for full arousal or make penetration comfortable. So, if a partner is saying you're "too loose," either they're simply experiencing a relaxed, aroused partner for the first time, or they're blowing smoke - either because they think it's the thing to say, or they were expecting to feel trapped in a vise, which is not how penetration should feel for either partner. ~ Heather Corinna

love. she liberated me to life, she continued to do that. and when she was in her final sickness i went out to san francisco and the doctor said she had 3 weeks to live, i asked her "would you come to north carolina?" she said yes. she had emphysema and lung cancer, i brought her to my home. she lived for a year and a half ..and when she was finally in extraneous she was on oxygen and fighting cancer for her life and i remembered her liberating me, and i said i hoped i would be able to liberate her, she deserved that from me. she deserved a great daughter and she got one. so in her last days, i said "i understand some people need permission to go… as i understand it you may have done what god put you here to do. you were a great worker, you must've been a great lover cause a lot of men and if I'm not wrong maybe a couple of woman risked their lives to love you. you were a piss poor mother of small children but a you were great mother of young adults, and if you need permission to go, i liberate you". and i went back to my house, and something said go back- i was in my pajamas, i jumped in my car and ran and the nurse said "she just gone". you see love liberates. it doesn't bind, love says i love you. i love you if you're in china, i love you if you're across town, i love you if you're in harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but thats not possible now, i love you so go. love liberate ~ Maya Angelou

Thoughts are a powerful thing, but most of us wield them haphazardly. By the time we are young adults our minds and personalities are shaped to a great degree. Our thinking becomes habit and routine, like a river, and our thoughts must follow wherever the ravine takes us. As our negative thinking takes over our mind like strangling vines, the years continue to pass and we lose our goals and dreams. We form perceptions of reality and assume that everyone else thinks and sees the world as we do. They do not. An interesting fact is that your perception of reality is almost always wrong. The good and bad news is that our lives are most affected by the way we think things are, not the way they actually are. Be careful what you think about, it absolutely will shape your life. ~ Adam Shepherd

We're told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy.
Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits - more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit - but also as being so miserable that they're in therapy. Or there's an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist. ~ Alfie Kohn

What will become of young adults who look accomplished on paper but seem to have a hard time making their way in the world without the constant involvement of their parents? How will the real world feel to a young person who has grown used to problems being solved for them and accustomed to praise at every turn? Is it too late for them to develop a hunger to be in charge of their own lives? Will they at some point stop referring to themselves as kids and dare to claim the "adult" label for themselves? If not, then what will become of a society populated by such "adults"? These were the questions that began to gnaw at ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

LOUIS SACHAR is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Christopher Award. He is also the author of Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake; Small Steps, winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Cardturner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Parents' Choice Gold Award recipient, and an ALA-YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. His books for younger readers include There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many others. ~ Louis Sachar

He had come to America, haven of peace and liberty, and it, too, was joining the slaughter, fighting for the big capitalists. There was no peace for men, only murder, cruelty, brutality. ~ James T. Farrell

The time to build your future is in your teenage years and your 20s, but equally, in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. ~ Lukasz Laniecki

I was 17 years old when I was killed by a vampire-Ruby Kennedy from My Handsome Vampire. ~ Vianka Van Bokkem

I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind. ~ Lisa Papademetriou

C. diff can sometimes be life-threatening, even in healthy young adults. ~ J. Thomas LaMont