Why is it that male coming of age narratives always feel autonomous, like they are coming into their own and becoming a man and like going off on a vision quest or howling at the moon or something, and female coming of age narratives are a thing that happens to women?
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘coming of age’
Educated: A Memoir
The most powerful moment in a woman's life. Your first grey hair.
— Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Ilana Wexler, Ilana Glazer, imdb.com
60 for the resonator, and my grandson wants the sex robot.
— Justin Rolland, Dan Harmon, Rick Sanchez, Justin Roiland, imdb.com
I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.
She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.
On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she w…
I see it now, sometimes in my own face, but also in the faces of younger girls on the subway, their pinkies linked, their eyes darting and wounded. See me, they say.
Getting people to look at you, I understood, was a way of getting things to happen.
I squeezed lemon juice on my hair until it was crisp and sticky, and then I sat in the sun, hoping my hair would lighten to her shade of pale. I studied her face for signs of my own, noting her polyester miniskirts, the slim legs in tall boots.
Marion smiled at him with an intensity that made her look almost cruel. I tried to smile that same way.
We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law. We were drifting through whole weeks, making bonfires at night, eating twenty popsicles in a row and burying the flimsy plastic wrappers all over the yard.
That day, when Jack watched Marion in the barn as he rolled a cigarette for her, I felt a flint of heat in my insides. When he glanced at me, I turned and hunched my shoulders, trying to relieve the strain of my breasts against the borrowed fabric. I never went out in that swimsuit again.
There would be no heroics, I understood. Just the dull terror, the physical pain that would have to be suffered through
The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice.
I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls. I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun.
These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.
These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.