Quote of the Day (John Green, on Seeing ‘The Beauty of the World As Young People Do’)

“We need to put down our armor of cynicism and irony and thinking that we know about everything that matters. We need to try to grapple with the beauty of the world as young people do: in an open, vulnerable way. It’s cheesy as all get out, but… when you’re lying down with your friends under a big sky at night and you’re looking at the stars and you’re conscious of how large the universe is, that’s a borderline sacred experience. If you lose that in adulthood, you’ve lost something really important.”— Young-adult novelist, vlogger, philanthropist, and philanthropist John Green quoted by David Marchese, “The Interview: John Green Knows That No One Really Loves You on the Internet,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 30, 2025

(The image of John Green that accompanies this post, which was taken on Nov. 19, 2024, comes from “Let's Talk about Money” on YouTube.)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on Adolescence)

“There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way, Book I of In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913-1927)

Faithful reader, maybe you’re thinking, “Marcel…wasn’t the name of Ross’ monkey on Friends?” If you’re comparing the label on this blog post to the picture, you may be thinking, “What does Molly Ringwald (let alone Jon Cryer) have to do with a French guy?”

A fair amount, as it happens.

For the longest time I had this idea that adolescence was this peculiarly American phenomenon of the postwar period, probably fostered by movies like Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Summer of ’42, and American Graffiti.

Even though these films from earlier years should have demonstrated otherwise, in my coming of age in the mid-Seventies I had a hard time imagining how teens in other times dealt with matters like school, class, acne, bodies out of sync with our ideals of perfection, love, or simply coming to terms with a world we never made.

In one way or another, of course, those were the very same issues that obsessed Gen X and made them gravitate to John Hughes’ mid-80s teen trilogy that made the carrot-topped Ms. Ringwald an icon of her time: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink (from which, as you surely have guessed by now, the image accompanying this post comes from).

Perhaps tiring of the demands of Hollywood in the mid-1990s, Ms. Ringwald briefly relocated to Paris, where she not only made some films but even married a French writer.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps when she was learning French, Ms. Ringwald must have encountered Marcel Proust’s enormously influential novel sequence. Three years ago, she told an interviewer from Entertainment Weekly that she’d been reading Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess, a triple biography of three women who furnished Proust with the model for his character the Duchesse de Guermantes.

At times, I have wondered how a sickly asthmatic like Proust could cut himself off from the society that furnished him with his subject matter, staying inside a bedroom with walls lined with cork as he worked obsessively to complete his life’s magnum opus.

But memory can be an enormously powerful force, and especially so adolescence, with its outsized emotions. Proust wouldn’t have needed his fabled madeleines to summon up that period of his life. The kids of “The Breakfast Club” might not have tackled his book, but they definitely would have understood the regret and spontaneity he identified as being central to this time in their lives.

Quote of the Day (Melissa Dahl, on Why the Teenage Years Stay So Long in Your Memory)

“There’s a reason why your teenage years stay with you. Perhaps you've heard of the reminiscence bump, a term psychologists use to describe the way the episodes of our lives that occur between the ages of ten and thirty tend to be recalled more vividly than those that occur earlier or later in life. Researchers have a few theories to explain the phenomenon; maybe, for instance, these memories stand out because of their novelty. It makes sense that you would remember your very first kiss more than your very eleventh kiss. But beyond that, throughout our life span, the moments that take prominence in our memories are those that are linked to our self-concept. During your awkward teenage years, you are laying the foundation for the path you'll follow as an adult—you join the school newspaper and see your name in print for the first time, or you take a volunteer tutoring job after school and realize you want to be an elementary school teacher. You carry your teen self around with you for life in part because these are the years you become yourself in the first place.”— Health and psychology journalist Melissa Dahl, Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness (2018)

I have noticed the “reminiscence bump” occurring among myself and others in my age group especially lately as so many of our contemporaries pass away. In the aftermath of their demise, we summon up memories not just to give shape to their lives, but also to better understand our own.

Quote of the Day (Phyllis McGinley, on a Girl Starting Adolescence)

“Thirteen’s anomalous – not that, not this:

Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,

Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.

Is the one age defeats the metaphor.

Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walled

But easily surrounded; is no city.

Nor, quitted once, can it be quite recalled –

Not even with pity.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978), “Portrait of a Girl With Comic Book,” The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 1952, reprinted in American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Vol. 2: E.E. Cummings to May Swenson, edited by Robert Haas and John Hollander (2000)

Quote of the Day (Cyndi Lauper, on Her Teens and Her Individuality)

“I withdrew, into music, records. I was different, and I was…you know, kids are cruel to each other. Now, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t give a shit what anybody says about me. You don’t like it, too fuckin’ bad. Because the truth is, you can’t stamp out individuality – there’s too many of us.”—American musician Cyndi Lauper, quoted in Kurt Loder, “Cyndi Lauper: Dream Girl,” Rolling Stone, May 24, 1984

Photo of the Day: ‘Springtime of Life’ at Hudson River Park, NYC

“I don't remember being very sensitive to spring in my early youth. I think the small child for whom everything is new, is not very surprised at miracles. The springtime of life begins with adolescence.”— French novelist-diarist and Nobel Literature laureate André Gide (1869-1951), Autumn Leaves (1950)

I took the image accompanying this post almost exactly two years ago at Hudson River Park in Manhattan. As I remember it, the day was not as warm as it was today—but, as you can tell from the photo, probably every bit as beautiful.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Franzen, on Adolescent Self-Consciousness)

“Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do.”— Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006)

Song Lyric of the Day (Feist, on ‘Old Teenage Hopes’)

“Old teenage hopes

Are alive at your door

Left you with nothing

But they want some more.”—Feist, “1234,” composed by Sally Seltmann and Feist, from Feist's CD The Reminder (2007)