Teenage Angst Quotes

“I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do.
I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't.”
― Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

“If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.”
― Eric Hoffer

“You have got to get creative if you want anyone to notice your goddamn teenage angst.”
― Nic Sheff, Schizo

“He couldn't remember having been seventeen; it was something that must have happened to him while he was busy. But it made him feel like he imagined it felt like when you were seventeen, which was like having a permanent red-hot vest on under your skin.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“My mother said, "Arturo, stop that. Your sister's tired."

"Oh Holy Ghost, Oh Holy inflated triple ego, get us out of the depression. Elect Roosevelt. Keep us on the gold standard. Take France off, but for Christ's sake keep us on!"

"Arturo, stop that"

"Oh Jehovah, in your infinite mutability see if you can't scrape up some coin for the Bandini family."

My mother said, "Shame, Arturo. Shame."

I got up on the divan and yelled, "I reject the hypothesis of God! Down with the decadence of a fraudulent Christianity! Religion is the opium of the people! All that we are or ever hope to be we owe to the devil and his bootleg apples!"

My mother came after me with the broom.”
― John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles

“Fitting in and being normal doesn't exist; not for a few years in the middle.”
― Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

“My life," she said dramatically, with her eyes closed, "is one heaping bowl of warmed-over despair, seasoned with equal dashes of aggravation and angst!”
― Rick Detorie

“Are you gay, Cherie?
Me, No… I’m not anything… I-I mean I prefer not to indulge, I stammered.
“Really... how do you mean?”
Well love has been an elusive story, like a fairytale adults tell children but I have never known any of it to be true. In reality it reminds me of religion. I am not sure God is real either, if God is real why do so many innocents suffer?
Innocents suffer because it is their destiny to suffer.
What? What does that mean?” I’m annoyed.
God has nothing to do with it. We are born into this world to experience all that is not God-like, so we can then be inspired to reach for higher spiritual goals.
I have never thought of it that way before. If that is so then I must be preparing for sainthood. Am I to think that all of my suffering as a child has been to prepare me for greatness?”
― Darwun St James, Angel Sins

“Well, you don′t know fuck about my family
Could never tell you what happened
The day I turned seventeen
The rise of a king, and the fall of a queen”
― Marina Diamandis

“In the ensuing silence, I have the time to contemplate the word cute – how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“All her pent-up misery and frustration broke loose with a vengeance, and she yelled at him, ‘You expect me to TRUST YOU?’ Her brain felt like a live coal, spitting sparks. ‘You expect me to go out with YOU! – when you tell me bare-faced LIES? D'you think I'm FUCKING STUPID?’ She slapped his face just as hard as she had the night before, then stood up and fled the length of the alley; tears streaming – hating herself – hating Bobby – hating the entire rotten, cruel, hateful world – filled with blind, savage, useless hate.
She didn't see the way he laid his head on his knees in despair, nor if he really cried.”
― Bernie Morris, Bobby's Girl

“Sometimes life’s a shit boat, and it feels like nothing’s ever gone right. And sometimes the only comfort you have is the fact that other people are also in your awful situation. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll make them feel a little less alone.”
― Ruby Walker, Advice I Ignored: Stories and Wisdom from a Formerly Depressed Teenager

“In each club we went the dancers had the same moves, none nearly as sensuous as mine on any dance floor, but because they are scantily clad and stripping off the men go nuts and throw money at them. In the largest club and the last we went to I watched one pretty girl with big boobs pull a handful of twenties in one set. I followed her to the ladies-room to learn she only danced a few rounds per night and averaged $250 every night and with my face and body she said I would bank much more.”
― Darwun St James, Angel Sins

“This is what we do. We do crazy shit because we're broken. That's who we are. That's what we do.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance

“I don't think you feel much of anything anymore.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance

“Most of her friends owned laptops and seemed to spend more time with their phones than anything else. Steffy kept her latest playlists and apps updated frequently. She was a member of what Peter called, The Gadget Generation. She could not imagine what it must have been like before such a time. The unbearable isolation that must have been present. How did people deal with it? When she asked a few older people in the town, they simply said she had too much spare time on her hands. It appeared thinking was a crime in the world she lived”
― Jaime Allison Parker, Justice of the Fox

“Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age, which meant the appeal of a girl like Anne-Marie was fuelled precisely by her unhappiness, and the greater the storms she engulfed him in, the more he wanted her.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“If school days are the happiest of your life, I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight.”
― Jackie Kennedy Onassis

“Every morning when I wake up, I don’t think I'm going to make it. Or maybe I think that I don’t want to make it.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, The Glass Girl

“Teenagers of every ilk also operate under the dark cloud of knowing that the easiest part of their lives is over and the terribly difficult years are about to commence. They understand they are beginning to make career and character defining decisions that will indelibly shape their future. Sensing that they must make life-defining decisions when they lack the maturity to apprehend the ramifications of their actions, heightens their pressurized anxiety.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I don’t even pretend to understand it all. I was president of the Luther League, the youth group of our church. I was a good kid and a bad kid at the same time. I was looking for a very nice girl but also a very bad girl. Do all young men have these conflicts? And, what about whores? Well, in my mind, prostitutes are bad girls. Matter of fact, they are professional bad girls. As I said earlier in this diary, you don’t make love to whores, you fuck them. There’s a difference. They don’t require love and courtship, all they want is my money. I go to the bedroom with them and do the deed with no affection. They take my money and leave. All my life I have been told that girls who have sex outside of marriage are bad girls... sluts. I’ve also been told by my dad, “Son, sex is the most beautiful expression of love in a marriage.”

Although I can appreciate the difference, that being, sex is meant for marriage only; my psyche has some difficulty reconciling the two messages. Sexually active girls are bad but sexually active wives are good. I’m afraid that someday if and when I wed the Pollyanna I’m looking for and fulfill my husbandly duty with her, I’m going to feel like I’m turning a good girl into a bad girl. In other words, I change my wife into a slut. And here’s the weirdest part: if my wife becomes a slut, the good boy in me will reject the bad girl I created in her. My angel and devil will be in a clinch hold.”
― Gerald Maclennon, God, Bombs & Viet Nam: Based on the Diary of a 20-Year-Old Navy Enlisted Man in the Vietnam Air War - 1967

“And I know I’d rather be happy and bland than tortured and interesting. Yet, sometimes it still makes me angry, that I don’t have the option to destroy myself anymore.”
― Ruby Walker, Advice I Ignored: Stories and Wisdom from a Formerly Depressed Teenager

“No matter how good I was, no matter how much I pleaded for it or worked for it, I could never make everyone understand me. If my self-esteem was dependent on other people’s feelings, it would never be under control. I’d be on a ship rocking back and forth between emptiness and salvation, never able to really find my feet. ”
― Ruby Walker, Advice I Ignored: Stories and Wisdom from a Formerly Depressed Teenager

“I'm never going to send my children to boarding school. The boys can go to P.S. 148 with gangsters, and then go to Columbia & the girls can go to Hunter College and they'll all be morons but at least they wont have to tear around and get their teeth knocked out playing hockey every day.

[Letter to R. Beverley Corbin, Jr, 3 October 1946]”
― Jackie Kennedy Onassis

“Dostoyevsky has become a teenager’s writer, the issue of nihilism a teenage issue.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“We were entering New York City now, via some highway that cut across the Bronx. Unfamiliar territory for me. I am a Manhattan boy; I know only the subways. Can’t even drive a car. Highways, autos, gas stations, tollbooths—artifacts out of a civilization with which I’ve had only the most peripheral contact. In high school, watching the kids from the suburbs pouring into the city on weekend dates, all of them driving, with golden-haired shikses next to them on the seat: not my world, not my world at all. Yet they were only sixteen, seventeen years old, the same as I. They seemed like demigods to me. They cruised the Strip from nine o’clock to half past one, then drove back to Larchmont, to Lawrence, to Upper Montclair, parking on some tranquil leafy street, scrambling with their dates into the back seat, white thighs flashing in the moonlight, the panties coming down, the zipper opening, the quick thrust, the grunts and groans. Whereas I was riding the subways, West Side I.R.T. That makes a difference in your sexual development. You can’t ball a girl in the subway. What about doing it standing up in an elevator, rising to the fifteenth floor on Riverside Drive? What about making it on the tarry roof of an apartment house, 250 feet above West End Avenue, bulling your way to climax while pigeons strut around you, criticizing your technique and clucking about the pimple on your ass? It’s another kind of life, growing up in Manhattan. Full of shortcomings and inconve-niences that wreck your adolescence. Whereas the lanky lads with the cars can frolic in four-wheeled motels. Of course, we who put up with the urban drawbacks develop compensating complexities. We have richer, more interesting souls, force-fed by adversity. I always separate the drivers from the nondrivers in drawing up my categories of people. The Olivers and the Timothys on the one hand, the Elis on the other. By rights Ned belongs with me, among the nondrivers, the thinkers, the bookish introverted tormented deprived subway riders. But he has a driver’s license. Yet one more example of his perverted nature.”
― Robert Silverberg, The Book of Skulls

“Most of the things I could wish for I can't have. It's big stuff, like how I wish Poppy were still here and we weren't selling Bean Well. Or medium stuff, like I didn't worry so much about where I stand with Leo and Connie, or I wasn't one ping in my parents' inbox away from getting busted for skipping out on summer school. Or stuff that wells up in me from some place I can usually keep quiet--I wish I were old enough to do whatever I wanted, to go out and take photographs all over the world instead of the same sleepy suburb over and over and over again.
I wish I didn't feel like a problem my parents had to solve.”
― Emma Lord, You Have a Match

“Marcy?!”
I startle at the sudden sound of my mother’s voice. She is standing on our back deck and can see clearly into the neighbor's yard.
“What are you doing in Bernstein’s yard!?”
― Alexis Bedard, When the Blood Smears

“I was in a black cloud around that time. Sometimes I think I have a bit of a gray cloud, at least, that still follows me around. I know people's parents get divorced, and every teenager is practically required to go through a stage where they shop at Hot Topic and say things like You laugh because I'm different, but I laugh because you're all the same.”
― Alicia Thompson, Love in the Time of Serial Killers

“He and Hattie had once been genuinely close, but ever since puberty, Jasper had been reduced to the level of a satellite, watching his friends as they breezed through their adolescence. He’d always taken a detached interest in it all, thinking, in his anxious disconnect from the others, that he was somehow better off compared to them – but, all in all, he had little to show for his time on this Earth, apart from just sort of being ‘there’.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat