"Adolescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ministers had been growing on him, and he had gradually seen less and less of the man who had been the kind comrade and teacher of his early childhood. His only real companions during this year of moody adolescence were his books. From the forgotten deposit in the old meal-ark upstairs, which had yielded 'Paradise Lost,' he drew other treasures by degrees. He found there, in all, some tattered leaves—three or ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over a hill as if each were anxious to see what was going on in the meadow beneath it. Followed by Jill and Sally, her lame duck, Mavis went to the first of the hill-fields, where geese, scarcely out of their adolescence, clamoured about her hands with their soothing, self-contented piping. Even the fierce old gander, which was the terror of stray children and timid maid-servants, deigned to notice her with a tolerant eye. Mavis sighed and ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... adults to this complication, especially with rheumatism. Therefore, acute mild endocarditis with future valvular lesions occurs most frequently during childhood and adolescence, and if one attack has occurred, a subsequent infection, especially of rheumatism, is liable to ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... exclusive selection of men like-minded is the best seed for the first planting of a commonwealth in the wilderness; secondly, that the exclusiveness that is justified in the infancy of such a community cannot wisely, nor even righteously, nor even possibly, be maintained in its adolescence and maturity. The church-state of Massachusetts and New Haven was overthrown at the end of the first generation by external interference. If it had continued a few years longer it must have fallen of itself; but it lasted long enough to be the mold in which the civilization ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... develop ideals in imitation of what goes on around them. Every child is likely at some time in his career to look forward to money-making as the most desirable end in life; but most normal children will pass beyond this ideal before adolescence. If, however, the atmosphere in which the child lives is one of money-getting, the child without strong tendencies toward other ideals is likely to allow this ideal to persist into adolescence and young manhood or womanhood. In such cases the ideal becomes fixed without indicating that ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... was written: "Between Simple Boyhood..." It was now, as Sir Austin had written it down, The Magnetic Age Laying of ghosts is a public duty On the threshold of Puberty, there is one Unselfish Hour Seed-Time passed thus smoothly, and adolescence came on They believe that the angels have been busy about them Who rises from Prayer a better man, his prayer is answered Young as when she looked upon the lovers in Paradise You've got ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... death may make the wife a widow, may sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life, may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence.... ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... suppose that Gotama himself was influenced by Iranian thought. His fundamental ideas, his view of life and his scheme of salvation are truly Hindu and not Iranian. But if the childhood of Buddhism was Indian, it grew to adolescence in a motley bazaar where Persians and their ways were familiar. Though the Buddhism exported to Ceylon escaped this phase, not merely Mahayanism but schools like the Sarvastivadins must have passed through it. The share of Zoroastrianism must not be exaggerated. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... youthful, for instance, than Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. The inflamed imagination, the violent exaggeration of emotion and of character, the jeering cynicism and lack of tolerance, the incoherent formlessness, are all indications of adolescence. In The Monk there are two distinct stories, loosely related. The story of Raymond and Agnes, into which the legends of the bleeding nun and Wandering Jew are woven with considerable skill, was published ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... vile experiences, were less certain, had wavered threateningly. She tried to read something in his face, in that energetic kindly face to which she had become accustomed so soon. But she was not yet capable of understanding its expression. Scared, discouraged on the threshold of adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not learned to read—not that sort ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... indeterminate motes of dust into clean water, we suddenly see, after an interval of not more than one or two hours, an adult vibrio crossing the field of the microscope, without our having been able to detect any intermediate state between its birth and adolescence? ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse now current—if not yet submerged—under the name or the pseudonym of the present {237} Viceroy—or Vice-empress is it?—of India. But the obvious truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his own, though he may have chosen to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... There is one assuring and comforting fact, however, bearing on this point, which should be carefully noted here, namely, when a retransplantation was made by Dr. Brinkley upon a goat which had first been cured of old age by transplantation of new glands, which was allowed to retain this new adolescence for a year, and was then deprived of the glands, causing a speedy return to the miserable condition of old age and its ills, and which was then re-operated upon and given two new glands, the instant ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... manifestations, just as surely as the song of birds or the color and perfume of flowers are sex qualities. And so it happens that all art and all literature is a confession; and it occurs, too, that childhood does not stand out sharp and clear on memory's chart until it is past and adolescence lies between. Then maturity gives back to the man the childhood ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... authoritative systems of social control found among all primitive peoples gives a vivid impression of the difficulty of the task of compelling man to die to himself, that is, to become a socius. The rigors and rituals of initiation ceremonies at adolescence impressed the duties of sociality at that impressionable period. The individual who refused to bow his head to the social yoke became a vagabond, an outcast, an excommunicate. In view of the fierceness ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... manners the disgraceful plague of public prostitution will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with great and genuine passions of the heart. The soul is happy in making great efforts of whatever kind; provided that it can act, that it can stir and move, it makes little difference, even though it exercise its power against ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... lives," as VIOLET HUNT tells it, there is really nothing very much to charm in a history of three disagreeable children developing into detestable young women. Perhaps it may have some value as a study of feminine adolescence, but I defy anyone to call the result attractive. Its chief incident, which is (not to mince matters) the attempted seduction by Christina of a middle-aged man, the father of one of her friends, mercifully comes to nothing. I like to believe that this sort of thing is as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon, walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he came to ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... no preparation at all for the stir and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one's natural desire ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... considerations. This is evident in the matter of obedience, whose strengthening into a habit is one of the most imperative tasks of nurture during childhood. Abstract laws and principles of right, so weighty in middle adolescence, have but slight influence over the child, unless joined with them is a strong personality whom the child loves or fears, and whose favor he desires ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... been sitting after dinner in the library at Craven Towers—his mother lying on the sofa that had been rolled up before the fire, and himself sprawled on the hearthrug at her feet. Already tall and strong beyond his years and confident in the full flush of his adolescence he had launched into a glowing anticipation of the life that lay before him. He had noticed that his mother's answers were monosyllabic and vague, and then when he had broken off, hurt at her seeming lack of interest, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... translated into harmonies of sculptured form. Children below run up to touch their knees, and reach out boyish arms to welcome them. Two young men, with half-draped busts and waving hair blown off their foreheads, anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto perfected in his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel was intended to represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. It is a scene from the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinated to the recumbent figure, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... effeminate attributes, well-attuned to a vacillating, purposeless mind. Far greater beauty did her eyes behold in this grimfaced soldier of fortune; the man as firm of purpose as he was upright of carriage; gloomy, proud, and reckless; still young, yet past the callow age of adolescence. Since the day of his coming to Castle Marleigh she had brought herself to look upon him as a hero stepped from the romancers' tales that in secret she had read. The mystery that seemed to envelop him; those hints at a past that was not good—but the measure of whose evil ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... question is important on the threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... could live, I believe, with children; to have those Pure and delicate forms encompassing, moving about you, This were enough, I could think; and truly with glad resignation Could from the dream of romance, from the fever of flushed adolescence, Look to escape and subside into peaceful avuncular functions. Nephews and nieces! alas, for as yet I have none! and, moreover, Mothers are jealous, I fear me, too often, too rightfully; fathers Think they have title exclusive to spoiling their own little darlings; And by the law of the land, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the "natural" so happily embodied about us—and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence—this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent assaults ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... old, living in a New-Hampshire village, had one of his legs crushed so as to require amputation. The little fellow was furnished with a "Peg" and stumped round upon it for ten years. We can imagine what he suffered as he grew into adolescence under the cross of this unsightly appendage. He was of comely aspect, tall, well-shaped, with well-marked, regular features. But just at the period when personal graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the Bank of Fortune, with Nature's signature at the bottom, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... probably the original of Pauline. She and her sister, Sarah Flower, the author of Nearer, My God, to Thee, were both older than Browning, and both his intimate friends during the period of his adolescence. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... mean in the amigo. Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he had the say ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... possession brings. It was his habit to call himself a poor man, and it was his dream that Rose should marry a rich one. Harry was hopeless. He had been his Grandmother's pet up to the years of adolescence: he was getting too old for any prospect of a military career he had no turn for diplomacy, no taste for any of the walks open to blood and birth, and was in headlong disgrace with the fountain of goodness at Beckley ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but he felt in his own person a craving for something that Titian could not teach him. The Venice he was born in was not the Venice of Titian's early youth, and his own adolescence fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making herself mistress of Italy. The haunting sense of powers almost irresistible gave a terrible fascination to Michelangelo's works, which are swayed by that sense ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... illuminated, looked like some mysterious grotto within which the rows of bottles of cognac and Mattoni gleamed like veins of quartz and felspar. We were, indeed, a race of troglodytes, and we were all either very young or very old. Our adolescence was all called up to the colours. There was never any news beyond a laconic bulletin issued from the Mairie at dusk, the typescript duplicates of which, posted up at street-corners, we read in groups by the light of a guttering candle, held up against the wall, and husbanded from ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... that no one should touch it but herself; but soon becoming tired of so helpless and troublesome a nursling, she had gladly yielded to my entreaties to be allowed to take charge of it; and I, by carefully nursing the little creature from infancy to adolescence, of course, had obtained its affections: a reward I should have greatly valued, and looked upon as far outweighing all the trouble I had had with it, had not poor Snap's grateful feelings exposed him to many a harsh word and many a spiteful kick ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus be represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... after whiskey. The orders from brigade headquarters had been strict against illuminations, for the Confederates were near at hand in force, and a surprise was proposed as well as feared. A tired and sleepy youngster, almost dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, or there ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... innocent affection to which we owe the tenderest pages, not only of Redgauntlet, but of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and of Rokeby. In all of these works the heroine has certain distinctive features, drawn from one and the same haunting dream of his manly adolescence. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the torn gables, the towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made these things you get in Perugino's pictures—in the hot sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the facade of San Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see his like? What a revel of disproportion in these long-legged nymphs, full- lipped and narrow-eyed ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... 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, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... south of France and Italy had residences far more favourable for such a disease, than our own country. This was one of the provincial notions of the day, that were entailed on us by means of colonial dependency. I suppose the colonial existence is as necessary to a people, as childhood and adolescence are to the man; but, as my Lady Mary Wortley Montagu told her friend, Lady Rich—"Nay; but look you, my dear madam, I grant it a very fine thing to continue always fifteen; that, everybody must approve of—it is quite fair: ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... swift imaginativeness which makes the feminine contribution to life so much a thing of charm and colour, Elise pursued the paths which Youth has for its own—those wonderful streets of fantasy that end with adolescence in Society's ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... said that it was merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but aesthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they might ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... nation is strangely paralleled by the development of an individual. There comes in both a period of adolescence, of the stirring of new powers, of an increase of strength, of the dawn of new ideals, of the awaking of self-consciousness; contours become defined and abrupt, awkward and hasty movements succeed to the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... youth, reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of adolescence.[141] ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... other West Indian islands, for example. The Transvaal and Orange River Colony received several millions after the war to enable the ruined farmers to start business on a footing of solvency. During the whole period of their adolescence, and, indeed, until quite a recent date, all the self-governing Colonies were virtually subsidized by the allocation of British forces for local defence, maintained at the Imperial charge. And Ireland paid her share of this charge. Similar garrisons were, are, and will be, maintained ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... lies in Mary Olivier's search for Reality, her relations with her mother, father and three brothers, and her final passage from the bondage of infancy, the conflicts of childhood and adolescence, the disenchantments (and other drawbacks) of maturity, to the freedom, peace ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... then rage and ravage, volcanoes must have their destructive fits, and the darkness must do its mean and tyrannical things while men are asleep; but calmness and sunshine triumph immeasurably on the whole. Of the cubs of iniquity, only here and there an individual escapes the crebrous perils of adolescence, develops into the full beast, and occupies a sublime place in history; whereas the genial men of sunshine, plenty as the fair days of summer, pass quietly over from the ruby of life's morning to the sapphire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... think of nothing but herself, and Rachael, wrapped in her own romance, was amused, as they walked along, to see how different her display of youthful egotism was from Billy's, and yet how typical of all adolescence. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... Unnoticed by the three during the colloquy, a little figure in a black dress had peeped through the door, and then glided into the room. It was a girl of about ten, who, in all candor, could scarcely be called pretty, although the awkward change of adolescence had not destroyed the delicate proportions of her hands and feet nor the beauty of her brown eyes. These were, just then, round and wondering, and fixed alternately on the colonel and the two women. But like many other round and wondering eyes, they had taken in ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
