"Adolescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Peter. Then he remembered a smaller sister of Ida May's, a little, squalling, yellow, wet-nosed nuisance that had annoyed his adolescence. So that little spoil-sport had grown up into the girl he had mistaken for Ida May. This fact increased his sense of strangeness—that sense of great change that had fallen on the village in his absence which formed the groundwork of all ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... over the period from four to seven with indoor kindergarten training. Neither physical training nor education is synonymous with confinement in school. The whole tendency of Nature's processes in children is nutritional; it is not until adolescence that she makes much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results, therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... accelerate, accentuate, acceptation, accessary, accession, accessory, acclamation, acclivity, accolade, accomplice, accost, acerbity, acetic, achromatic, acidulous, acme, acolyte, acoustics, acquiescence, acquisitive, acrimonious, acumen, adage, adamantine, addict, adduce, adhesive, adipose, adjudicate, adolescence, adulation, adulterate, advent, adventitious, aerial, affability, affidavit, affiliate, affinity, agglomerate, agglutinate, aggrandizement, agnostic, alignment, aliment, allegorical, alleviate, altercation, altruistic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... known more of the psychological meaning of adolescence, a new theory of Conversion has sprung up; and whether or not we accept it, the whole outlook over the underlying principle of conversion has been changed. We must at least recognize that conversion is a scientific process, as much as digestion is, or respiration; it is not ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... people wandered on, full of their discovery of love, and yet so full too of the shyness of adolescence that the word "Love" never passed their lips that day. Yet as they talked on, and the kindly dusk gathered about them, their speech and their hearts came very close together. But their speech would seem so threadbare, written ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... relations between father and son are of the closest the boy begins to look around him and often, for no other reason than the novelty of the influence, he falls under the tutelage of another to whom he gives a confidence that his father could never secure. As they enter the period of adolescence, boys will often talk on many subjects with strangers with a freedom that parents, especially fathers, can never hope to see equalled unless the most perfect confidence has existed from the earliest childhood. Those who have taught for many years and who have had growing boys in their charge ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... intelligence, compared with the empires of former days, we have no right to think that the goal of prosperity and glory is attained. England has by no means reached the zenith of earthly power; science is as yet but in its infancy; the human mind has scarcely arrived at adolescence; and, for aught we imperfect beings know, this little island may be destined by Divine Providence to continue as a light unto the heathen—as a nucleus for the final civilization of man."—Preface to "Taxation of the British Empire," published ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... began Ishmael, then paused. Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Its first movement was allegro agitato, adagio, and allegretto scherzando, picturing each vivid phase of early boyhood; next came the requisite andante,—a dreaming melody, expressing all the yearning, the vague melancholy of pre-adolescence; then the third: a rippling scherzo of youthful pleasures, gayety, young loves and joyous dances; finally a tempestuous finale: allegretto sforzando e appassionato—the rising of the burdens of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Frances, delicate studies subtly differentiated. Even the little cats have their astonishing individuality, and I don't envy anyone who can read of Jerry's death and Nicky's grief without a gulp. The Vortex is—no, not the War; that comes later—but the trials of a world which tests adolescence, a world of suffrage rebellions, of Futuristic art and morals. Then the real vortex of the War, the Victory which means ready (or difficult, unready) sacrifice and death for the boys and their friends and as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... which he manfully wiped away with a sneaking little movement of his left hand, as he pretended to look out of the window toward the distant lights. A man whose tear-ducts have dried with adolescence is cursed with a shriveled soul for ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... thing. Every part of Canada felt the quickened pulse. Two more transcontinental railroads had to be built. All-red routes of round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world cables were laid. The quickened pulse was Canada's passing from hobble-de-hoy adolescence with a chip on the shoulder and a tremor in the throat to big strong, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... effort at achievement. The very essence of youth is excitement. There must be tension, strain, a tiptoe attitude, a strong "Excelsior"-like ambition to climb, and a corresponding horror of inferiority, Miderwertigkeit. Youth is an age of idealism, and the tension decade of adolescence needs a regimen and an idealization all its own, to set back-fires to temptation. Instead of the current altogether too plain talk on sex hygiene and teaching, we must realize that every enthusiasm or real interest, be it in the multiplication table or in literature, debate, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... was first a vague restlessness and distress, then a period of voracity—as in the case of the young rats at Hankey—and then the growing creature had a sort of exaggerated anaemia and sickened and died. Plants suffered in a similar way. This, however, applied only to the growth period. So soon as adolescence was attained—in plants this was represented by the formation of the first flower-buds—the need and appetite for Herakleophorbia diminished, and so soon as the plant or animal was fully adult, it became altogether ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... daughter of a carpenter and bee-keeper. On her mother's death, this man married a young woman, and allowed her, as stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till adolescence, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as forester on ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... eat it; with a sixpence to spend it.' A few boyish persons carry this further, and think that the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. The mere reading of a rare book is a puerility, an idiosyncrasy of adolescence; it is the ownership of the book which is the matter of distinction. The collector of coins does not accumulate his treasures for the purpose of ultimately spending them in the marketplace. The lover of postage-stamps, small as his horizon may be, does not hoard his colored ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... conscious of an audience, and are carefully prevented from being children. The result is a horror. The child is only an effective actor so long as it does not "act." As soon as these youngsters reach the age of fifteen or sixteen the dramatic faculty is stilled, and lies dormant throughout adolescence. They are useless on the stage, for, beginning to "find themselves," they become conscious artists, and, in the theatrical phrase, it doesn't come off. It is hardly to be expected that it should, for acting, of all the arts, most demands a knowledge of the human ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... I wrote a parallel between Wagner and Whitman; between the most consciously artistic of men and the wildest among improvisators. But then it seemed to me that both had thrown off the "shackles of convention." (What prison-like similes we are given to in the heady, generous impulses of green adolescence.) I was a boy, and seeing Walt on Market Street, as he came from the Camden Ferry, I resolved to visit him. It was some time after the Fourth of July, 1877, and I soon found his little house on Mickle Street. A policeman at ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... no period in which the moving mind of genius is not receptive. In those days of wayward adolescence, Goldsmith found books somewhere, and many, and read them to the depths. Some men have left lists of the works they studied—even Burns and Byron did. Noll was never at any time systematic enough to have done this. Often the spirit is more influenced by the things that are read and not greatly ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil association of ideas has been established—the association of poetry, the highest of all arts, either with the saying of lines without meaning, or with the learning of "poems" devoid of what ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... "churchiness" during this period. His interest in religion, although it resembled the familiar conversions of adolescence, was a real resurrection of emotions which had been stifled by these years at Haverton House following upon the paralyzing grief of his mother's death. Had he been in contact during that time with an influence like the Vicar of Meade Cantorum, he would probably have escaped ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the incidents of his childhood, the period of the Tohu, of chaos and confusion, the days of study, misery, superstition. He recalls the years of adolescence, his premature marriage, his struggle for a bare existence, his wretched life as a teacher of the Talmud, panting under the double yoke of a mother-in-law and a rigid ceremonial. Then comes his introduction to Hebrew literature. His conscience long refuses assent, but stern logic triumphs, and ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... prevented him from rereading the scene until be came to edit the play. Johnson's deepest feelings and convictions, Professor Clifford has recently reminded us, can be traced back to his childhood and adolescence. But it is surprising to learn, as one does from his commentary, that other scenes in these very plays (Hamlet and King Lear, and in Macbeth, too) leave him unmoved, if one can so interpret ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... self-knowledge, that apathetic indifference stirred at moments to a quick sensitive alertness almost resembling self-defence. She was aware of her own story; that was certain. And the acid of that knowledge was etching the designs of character upon a physical adolescence ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... slain ere his time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone abides near to him. To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than to aught else. I became possessed of them in the period of my culminating adolescence. I know they changed the entire course of my life and trend of my mind. They gave to me a modesty and a humility in the world, from which my father's fortune has ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... independent, and masculine. Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing when ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... fewer reasons for action, and the closer the walls of Jean-Christophe's prison of care and banal tasks were drawn about him, the more his heart in its revolt felt its independence. In a life without obstacles he would doubtless have abandoned himself to chance and to the voluptuous sauntering of adolescence. As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock. It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts between unshakable bounds. In that sense it ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... he claimed that he had penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere. Under hypnotism Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... anticipated only the deep satisfaction of accomplishment. He'd wanted to do great things since he was a small boy, and in electronics since his adolescence, when he'd found textbooks in the libraries of looted spaceships. He'd gone to Walden in the hope of achievement. There, of course, he failed because in a free economy industrialists consider that freedom is the privilege to be stupid without ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... character at this period, where he ends what he calls the epoch of childhood, and begins that of adolescence, as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... every woman, over and above this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... walked to the fire-place. On the mantelpiece, she knew, there was a photograph of herself at Leonetta's age. She felt she wanted to examine this record of her adolescence. She was groping for strength: she wished to ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... with the present and advanced age, they are the Children, and the learned and pious of the nineteenth century are the Fathers. We are three hundred years older than Luther and his noble coadjutors, and eighteen hundred years older than the primitives; theirs was the age of infancy and adolescence, and ours that of full-grown, adult manhood. They were the Children; we are the Fathers; the tables are turned." Down to its merger in 1915 with the Lutheran Church Work, the Observer has always borne the stamp of Kurtz's Reformed and Methodistic theology, as well as of his fanatical ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... and mysticism of adolescence had urged her toward a monastic life. Her father almost choked with sorrow at the idea, but it was the call of religion, that religion to which she longed to devote her life! Don Benito consented to her entering a monastery in Majorca, where he could see his daughter every day, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... according to his father's description, strongly favoured in person his grandfather Fazio.[114] He had come into the world at a time when his parents' fortunes were at their lowest ebb, during those terrible months spent at Gallarate,[115] and in his adolescence he bore divers physical evidences of the ill nurture—it would be unjust to call it neglect—which he had received. At one time he was indeed put in charge of a good nurse, but he had to be withdrawn ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of glad adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality, when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends what was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenth ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... for years, and from the time that Anne was seventeen Braden had loved her. He had been a quiet, rather shy boy, and she a gay, self-possessed creature whose outlook upon life was so far advanced beyond his, even in those days of adolescence, that he looked upon her as the eighth wonder of the world. She had poise, manner, worldly wisdom of a pleasantly superficial character that stood for sophistication in his blissful estimate of her advantages over him, and she was so adroit ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... which the old man was a stranger; and had made the good bishop lose the corn-fleet which was starting for Italy from his importunity to learn the Catechism. Baptized he was, confirmed, communicated; but a boy's nature is variable, and by the time Agellius had reached adolescence, the gracious impulses of his childhood had in some measure faded away, though he still retained his faith in its first keenness and vigour. But he had no one to keep him up to his duty; no exhortations, no example, no sympathy. His father's friends ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... work of cerebral organization is chiefly completed after birth, as we see by contrasting the smooth ape-like brain-surface of the new-born child with the deeply-furrowed and myriad-seamed surface of the adult civilized brain. The plastic period of adolescence, lengthened in civilized man until it has come to cover more than one third of his lifetime, is thus the guaranty of his boundless progressiveness. Inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... developed females, strong as is the affection of the average female for her new born offspring, the closeness of the relation between mother and child tends rapidly to shrink as time passes, so that by the time of adolescence is reached the relation between mother and son becomes little more than a remembrance of a close inter-union which once existed. It is, perhaps, seldom, till the very highest point of intellectual growth and mental virility ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... body was about to affect the lungs. Those eloquent patches would have warned her of an imminent danger. But an old maid, one in whom the family instincts have never been awakened, to whom the needs of childhood and the precautions required for adolescence were unknown, had neither the indulgence nor the compassionate intelligence of a mother; such sufferings as those of Pierrette, instead of softening her heart ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... with easy words. How characterless they looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless side-pockets! It was a pain to see them, and a sword-like pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... independence only when incited to do so and aided by Bolivar of Colombia and San Martin of Buenos Aires. After the revolution, Peru was torn by internal discord rather more than other Spanish-American countries during the period of adolescence; and it was its misfortune to lose territory after territory. Bolivar took northern Peru, including the valuable seaport of Guayaquil, and made it a part of the first Colombia; and largely through the influence of Bolivar ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... discovering new continents, of being first to climb a hitherto unscaled peak, to walk before others the shores of strange archipelagoes, to bring back tales of outlandish places and unfrequented isles. Well, I was doing these things now, long after the disillusionment adolescence brought to these childish dreams. But in addition it was in a sense my island, my mountain, my land—for I had caused it to be. A sensation of tremendous vivacity and wellbeing seized upon me; I could not have lain upon the grass more ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... looked upon as hypotheses to be tested by trial under standard conditions. For example, I might argue that The Tale of Two Cities should be placed in the third year because the emotional ferment of adolescence is then most favorable for the engendering of the ideal. But in the first place, this assumed principle would itself be subject to grave question and it would also have to be determined whether there is so little variation among the pupils in respect of physiological ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... he built the superstructure of his days. Not evil, but wholly irresponsible. The urge of vital youth had caught him and held him. And Clayton, sitting that day beside him in the car, while Graham drove and the golf clubs rattled in their bags at his feet, remembered again the impulses of his own adolescence, and wondered. There had been a time when he would have gone to the boy frankly, with the anxieties he was beginning to feel. There were so many things he wanted to tell the boy. So many warnings ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company," he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of this sort are often accompanied by international unrest—because of the normal ebullience of national adolescence and the desire to be accepted by the world community, as well as a variety of concomitant ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... American; and no question arose in my mind that my books or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a time when the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged itself automatically, and I had leisure once more to look over and around things. This period coinciding with my moody adolescence, I rapidly entangled myself in a net of doubts and questions, after the well-known manner of a growing girl. I asked once more, How did I come to be?—and I found that I was no whit wiser than poor Reb' ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin |
