Officially A Teenager Quotes

We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.

I think being a teenager is such a compelling time period in your life--it gives you some of your worst scars and some of your most exhilarating moments. It's a fascinating place; old enough to feel truly adult, old enough to make decisions that affect the rest of your life, old enough to fall in love, yet, at the same time too young (in most cases) to be free to make a lot of those decisions without someone else's approval.

We had grown into one another somewhere along the way. We were officially a team.

In The Hunger Games, there's something for everyone. A gripping adventure. A political commentary. A love story. A cautionary tale. Some call it science fiction, some call it potential reality. Some say it's for teenagers, some say it's for adults. The book--and now the film--captures themes and concerns that seem timely. But its real strength, in the end, is that it's timeless. It speaks to us today, and it will speak--even more powerfully--tomorrow.

The image of a teenage boy dressed in a black uniform, his babyish face partly obscured by an official looking cap, paralysed every muscle and nerve in her body. The pink telegram loomed large in her line of sight...

Speaking of which, I also met a teenager that could command silver butterflies around on Mount Yu Jun. Does anyone know who that was?” The lively, bustling chaotic spirit communication array suddenly fell silent the moment those words were out. This kind of reaction, Xie Lian had seen it coming and so he just waited patiently. After a while, Ling Wen finally asked, “Your Highness Crown Prince, what did you just say?” Mu Qing coldly answered for him, “He just said, he met Hua Cheng.” Finally obtaining the name of that red-clothed young man, Xie Lian was ineffably in a good mood. He smiled and said, “So his name is Hua Cheng? Hm, this name suits him quite well.

So this book is like a thank you. We want everyone to know the story of how four Western Sydney teenagers picked up their instruments and dreamt of being one of the biggest bands in the world.

The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming 'a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.' I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door.

The absence of adult males upsets the natural order in our species and in others. For example, game wardens in South Africa recently had to kill several teenage male elephants that had uncharacteristically become violent. These young elephants behaved like a contemporary street gang—and perhaps for the same reason: There were no adult males in their lives. To solve the problem, park officials imported adult male elephants from outside the area. Almost immediately, the remaining juveniles stopped misbehaving. Testosterone ungoverned by experience is dangerous, and older males temper the craving for dominance—merely by being dominant themselves.

The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?” “Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said. Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.” “But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.

I can’t believe how much damage has been done, just from teenage loves meeting again. People should never come into contact with their first loves, I decide. There should be some official form of quarantine. The rule should be: you break up with your teenage lover and that’s it. One of you has to emigrate.

We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. But not with gun violence. ELIZABETH WARREN, U.S. senator,  in her book A Fighting Chance ~ ~ ~

In a June 25, 2010, Washington Post article, the CIA acknowledged officially discussing the creation of a video of a fake Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy in order to discredit him in the eyes of the Iraqi people. Evidently, the Agency did create a video of a fake Osama Bin Laden drinking liquor around a campfire with his cronies, bragging about their conquests of young boys. The article quoted an anonymous former CIA officer “chuckling” at the memory, and declaring that the actors used in the video were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees.” These ridiculous clandestine ideas brought to mind the childish efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro forty years earlier.

But if the line is drawn farther off, or not drawn at all, then the homosexual must go ever further for the same thrill of transgression. He must invent new methods, new combinations. Not content with merely inserting his organ of generation in the place of evacuation and uncleanness, he has to insert his fist there too—and we are subjected to the absurdity of school officials nodding in their superior wisdom as Mr. Savage explains to teenagers that you really can shape your fist so that it won’t cause intense pain or tear the rectum or do a host of other things that he won’t tell them about, because they involve diseases like hepatitis, and it’s best to hide those things from teenagers who are apt to be squeamish about people sneezing on their lunch, let alone invading their intestines.

While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world. Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.

On the rare occasions when a reporter asks if a criminal is an immigrant, government officials summarily dismiss the question as if it would be racist to discuss the defendant’s nation of birth. Ricardo DeLeon Flores killed a teenaged girl in Kansas after speeding through a stop sign and crashing into two cars. “When asked whether Flores was a U.S. citizen,” the local Kansas newspaper reported, “Deborah Owens of the Leavenworth County Attorney’s Office said she had no knowledge of his citizenship status.”33 Was the Spanish translator a hint? The ICE officials showing up in court? His Oakland Raiders T-shirt? Two families’ lives were forever changed by the reckless behavior of someone who should not have been in this country, but the prosecutor refused to tell a reporter that Flores was an illegal immigrant. Owens must have felt a warm rush of self-righteousness, thinking how much better she is than all those blood-and-soil types who want to know when foreigners kill Americans.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora’s most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the ‘swan’ (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress’s detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora’s services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times. Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltreatment, she found herself abandoned by the Byzantine official, her meal-ticket revoked. A discarded mistress, on the road, was as wretched as things could get in the sixth century. (...) Theodora tried to find her way back to the mother city, making ends meet as a prostitute, and the only people to give the twenty-year-old reject shelter were a group of Christians in the city of Alexandria. That random act of kindness was epoch-forming.

I think that, paradoxically, one of the things that stops it from being noticed is how out of the ordinary it is. If a hacker came to some official with a suspicion that he had unearthed a sex trafficking organization, that might be listened to. That happens. But when someone tells an official that they found an organization that mutates teenagers and animals and is releasing a disease into the world’s water supply, that’s not listened to; the Academy looks like a hoax, and that helps to conceal it. Also, if I were to take a guess, I’d assume that these elite hackers aren’t all people who have good standing with the world governments. There’s another option, too. Maybe the Academy threatens them if they’re found. Or maybe some Multipliers take care of them if they are trying to reveal the Academy. The Multipliers don’t want the Academy revealed as much as anyone. If that happens, the Wolf Flu stops killing people and the population that they are going to fight against stops decreasing.

The Ukrainian man told us that the Russians came in twice and took his farm, all of his grain that he grew, and that they did this to everyone. He was a boy the first time, in the 1920s, a teenager I think. His father argued with the official, and they shot him on the spot. Then they came again just a few years before the war, and again they took everything.

Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.

give you props for that. I never liked how the state let this place fall apart. I’m glad you’re refurbishing it.” “Thanks, I guess,” I said, my internal danger alarm sounding. Why would Hemlock Cove’s police chief visit me on official business? “What’s going on?” “Well, we’ve had reports of local teenagers raising a ruckus out here,” Chief Terry said. “I want you to be on the lookout in case they try to break into the lighthouse or vandalize any of the construction.” “I’ve been living out here,” I pointed out. “I think I would’ve heard something like that.” “We’ve gotten four different reports from neighbors,” Chief Terry supplied. “I think the kids are partying out here from the sounds of it, but Lionel Strong claims that they’re out here sacrificing chickens,

Huyck proved to be an outstanding administrator and, despite his lack of experience, quickly achieved one of the board’s top priorities. By ensuring that the teachers, curriculum, and classroom offerings met the necessary educational standards, he earned official accreditation for the school, a certification that made it eligible for federal and state financial aid.9 Along with his academic duties, he made time to coach the school’s poultry-judging team, which—as the local press proudly noted—“won over six other teams from high schools in larger towns in a recent contest.”10 At the annual meeting of the Michigan State Teachers’ Association in November 1923, Emory was chosen as a delegate to the general assembly and helped draft a resolution calling for the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act—formally known as the National Prohibition Act—“not only to prevent production and consumption of alcoholic liquors, but also to teach the children respect for the law.”11 He was also a member of both the Masons, “the most prestigious fraternal organization in Bath’s highly Protestant community,”12 and the Stockman Grange, at whose annual meeting in January 1924 he served as toastmaster and delivered a well-received talk on “The Bean Plant and Its Relation to Life.”13 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man with his military training, Huyck was something of a disciplinarian, demanding strict standards of conduct from both the pupils and staff. “At day’s end,” writes one historian, “students were required to march from the building to the tune of martial music played on the piano. During the day, students tiptoed in the halls.” When a pair of high-spirited teenaged girls “greeted their barely older teachers with a jaunty ‘Well, hello gals,’” they were immediately sent to the superintendent, who imposed a “penalty [of] individual conferences with those teachers and apologies to them.”14

It's a short and silly exchange, but there's a playfulness that hangs between us that's making me all sorts of giddy. It's probably because we've officially given in to the tension that we've spent the past year and a half building. It kicked off that day in his office when we made out like two hormonal teenagers. It amped up the day we saw each other topless while arguing. And it culminated early this morning when we both admitted that we've been crushing on each other ever since we met. And even though I'm not sure how exactly to proceed, one thing's for sure: there's really no way to go back to being the friendly colleagues we once were---and that thought excites me.

Somebody is in a queer state of mind, perhaps behaves oddly, and no reason for this can be discovered at the time. Later—a month, a year, 10 years—the cause of this effect reveals itself. Because of where or what or how I am now, I behaved in such a fashion then.”54 Priestley called this the “future-influencing-present effect”—not unlike what later researchers would call presentiment but unfolding in many cases across a much longer timeframe of an individual’s life. In his 1964 book Man & Time, Priestley described several examples. One letter-writer was a WWII veteran with what we would now call PTSD, who experienced a “breakdown” during the war and relapses of his condition thereafter. He credited his recovery to a somewhat older woman with children whom he met and married after the war and, by the time of his writing, had a teenage daughter with. But “for a year before he met his wife or knew anything about her, he used to pass the gate of her country cottage on the local bus. And he never did this without feeling that he and that cottage were somehow related.”55 Another, older letter writer recalled being a girl during the First World War and when out walking one night in London, “found herself looking up at a hospital, quite strange to her, with tears streaming down her cheeks.” Years later, she moved in with a woman friend, and they remained partners for 25 years. “This friend was then taken ill and she died in that same hospital at which the girl so many years before had stared through her inexplicable tears.”56 Priestley also gives an example from two acquaintances of his own: Dr A began to receive official reports from Mrs B, who was in charge of one branch of a large department. These were not personal letters signed by Mrs B, but the usual duplicated official documents. Dr A did not know Mrs B, had never seen her, knew nothing about her except that she had this particular job. Nevertheless, he felt a growing excitement as he received more and more of these communications from Mrs B. This was so obvious that his secretary made some comment on it. A year later he had met Mrs B and fallen in love with her. They are now most happily married. He believes … that he felt this strange excitement because the future relationship communicated it to him; we might say that one part of his mind, not accessible to consciousness except as a queer feeling, already knew that Mrs B was to be tremendously important to him.57

But a child is entitled to quit piano without the entire world asking why she doesn’t practice anymore. She’s also entitled to nurse a passing crush that may end badly and take it all back without ceremony or official decree. This is obviously true for announcements of sexual identity as well—gay, straight, trans, whatever. A teenager may believe she is merely announcing herself an adult, but she’s also sending up a flare to actual adults who will immediately contact her and offer “support,” primed to take advantage. Send prom pictures in an email if you must, but don’t post them for the content-hungry eyes of internet strangers. Find some other way to stay connected with those you care about.

Agent Briggs had led that team. Shortly thereafter, he’d started using Dean—the son of a notorious serial killer—to get inside the head of other killers. Eventually, the FBI had discovered what Briggs was doing and, instead of firing him, they’d made it official. Dean had been moved into an old house in the town outside of Marine Corps Base Quantico. Briggs had hired a man named Judd to act as Dean’s guardian. Over time, Briggs had begun recruiting other teenagers with savant-like skills. First Lia, with her uncanny ability to lie and to spot lies when they exited the mouths of others. Then Sloane and Michael, and finally me.

Gates’s awkwardness, however, was only skin deep, covering an innate grasp of commerce. Almost as soon as he learned to write programs, he tried to sell them. He was drawn to the crucible of the marketplace. This was unusual for a teenage programmer in the early seventies. Most of his peers styled themselves as socially rebellious hackers, who saw in computing a means to tweak the establishment. Not Gates. He devised a gadget that compiled traffic data, selling his Traf-O-Data system to several towns in the area. He hoped to land the city of Seattle as a customer too. But when a city official came to Gates’s home for a demonstration, the traffic program failed. A distraught Gates, trying to hold the official’s interest, pleaded: “Tell him, Mom—tell him it really works!” Gates,

Focusing on the public school system, former Secretary of Education, William Bennett explains the moral crisis in that institution by contrasting the concerns of teachers in two different eras: 'Over the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asking the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.' During the thirty-year period of 1960 to 1990, 'there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high-school students.' We do not believe it is a coincidence that the increase of moral mayhem described by Bennett corresponds with an increased acceptance of moral relativism. In fact, relativism has been officially incorporated in the educational curriculum, known as values clarification.

In Delaware, violence among black teenagers was so rampant that the Black Elected Officials of New Castle County wrote a similar letter to the governor of Delaware, asking for the National Guard to patrol the streets of Wilmington.

No matter how hard I tried, whether it was to help Anthony, to threaten him, to sympathize with him, to ignore him, to throw him out of my house, it was impossible to move on. This man was going to ruin me, and now he was going to jeopardize HRC's chances of winning the presidency, which would leave our country in the hands of someone dangerously unfit for the office. On the plane after the event, Jen came over to update HRC. The letter Comey had sent to Congress was out. It confirmed what the reporters had heard. The Comey investigation was officially reopened. It turned out that the Southern District, which was prosecuting Anthony's case involving the teenager, had found emails of mine on his laptop and to this day I do not know where or how because I never knew they were there. They called the FBI's New York office, who then called the DC office, which meant the laptop had ended up with Comey. They didn't alert Anthony's attorneys or mine. I watched HRC's face as she processed it. The moment she made eye contact with me, I just broke down. I had held it together for months—through the night of the shocking photo, all the meetings with Children's Services, the paparazzi on the street, becoming a single parent overnight, the daily hate messages, and even, until just a few minutes ago, the news about Comey's announcement to Congress. But now that I knew the investigation somehow involved my own email, tears flowed out of me. HRC stood up from her seat, came over to hug me, and then walked with me to the bathroom so I could compose myself. On a plane full of colleagues, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers—everyone with eyes simultaneously averted and questioning—she did that.

Rusk’s three children (particularly the two who were teenagers living in Washington with their parents in 1962) recall that their father was calm but somber and preoccupied during the crisis and that afterwards he immediately returned to his normal routine at the State Department; there was never a hint of any kind of physical or mental breakdown.7 If such a collapse had indeed occurred—and nothing of that kind remains secret very long in the sieve that is Washington, D.C.—it is inconceivable that JFK and later LBJ would have retained Rusk as secretary of state for eight years (the second-longest term in U.S. history).8 In short, there is not a shred of evidence from the tapes or any other official, public, or private source to substantiate this rather nasty piece of character assassination.

Successive popes included one pontiff whose eldest son, Pierluigi Farnese, was widely accused of raping a twenty-four-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was subsequently murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy Father, former principal papal legate at the Council, on being elected Pope Julius III, made his teenage rentboy lover a cardinal. It might seem appropriate that the Council’s official physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, was the first person to name and provide a detailed diagnosis for syphilis; contemporary senior churchmen would have provided Fracastoro with plenty of case studies for his epic poem on the subject.