“Life was good back then, in the crappy, oppressive way life is good for fourteen year olds, which is to say, it completely sucked but seems pretty good in the obscuring glare of nostalgia.”
Source: Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One Through Nine
“I have no idea what cunnilingus is – certainly no one I've met in Wolverhampton can afford it.”
Source: How to Be a Woman
“Due to these influences and many others, iGen is distinct from every previous generation in how its members spend their time, how they behave, and their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. They are obsessed with safety and fearful of their economic futures, and they have no patience for inequality based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. They are a the forefront of the worst mental health crisis ind decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.”
Source: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us
“There is hell and there is war. The two are difficult to distinguish, but hopefully you’ll never know the sting of either. That’s why you need to be good girls. The world is a mysterious place, full of times. An abundance of times. Times. War times. Peace times. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out exactly what time. As you sit here today, ask yourself: What time is it?”
Source: The Guineveres
“But we're talking about America here, where babies grow up to be even bigger babies, and all we really get along the way is incurable anxiety and crippling student loan debt.”
Source: Everything Is Awful: And Other Observations
“I went on to spend an inordinate amount of my childhood bashfully attached to my mother's pelvis, mostly out of social anxiety, but also because I was raised, from an early age, to fear anything that posed even the mildest of threats”
Source: Everything Is Awful: And Other Observations
“It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose the ability to wonder about something central-something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought.”
Source: Sophie’s World
“Simply growing ‘up’ is far too limited. Rather, I want to grow in every direction.”
“It’s not your fault if you were born or brought up in adverse circumstances. But, if this continues when you are an independent adult, no one else is responsible.”
“Still, I wondered what Sam, mental illness and all, might have to tell us about adulthood. Why, for example, did it seem to be always receding as a concept, even as we got older?”
Source: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life