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 (Tom Wolfe, on ‘Jersey Teenagers’ When First on the Loose in NYC)

“The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.”—American “New Journalist” and novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

The term “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” is believed to have first appeared in print in a December 1977 New York Times article, quoting Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell. But a dozen years before, Tom Wolfe had analyzed, with a sociologist’s exactitude and a zest all his own, the youthful contingent of this mobile brigade.

As I read the above passage, I did some quick math. The teens that Wolfe was describing, if they are alive today, would be grandparents.

Years earlier, when they had kids of their own, they had to endure with their adolescent girls the same ritual they’d tried out with their parents: i.e., “put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you're going out with some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell her that ‘for God’s sake’ is not cursing.”

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 (Shirley Jackson, on a Daughter Becoming a Teen)

“Last year I sent my daughter, an agreeable child who liked to play baseball and thought boys were silly, off to camp. I got back – and it only took two months – a creature who slept with curlers in her hair, bought perfume from the five-and-ten, and addressed me as nothing but ‘Mother, honestly!’

“By now she also calls me ‘Honestly, Mother!’ and ‘Mother, really’ and sometimes just plain ‘Mother.’ She worries constantly about her figure—usually with one hand in the refrigerator. She thinks any beardless adolescent who sings through his nose is ‘cute.’ She has perceived that in addition to being slightly behind the times in my dress and manner, I am hopelessly dated in my grasp of teenagers–especially of what ‘everyone else’ is allowed to do. This, incidentally, is a phrase I can't even write without feeling a little chill down my back. My daughter says it without difficulty. I tell her, ‘I don’t care what everyone else does…’ and ‘No daughter of mine is going to…’ and ‘When I was your age, I had…’ Neither of us listens to the other. She no longer thinks boys are silly.”—American horror and humor writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), “Motherly, Honestly!”, originally printed in Good Housekeeping, reprinted in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by Laurence Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt (2015)

It can be hard to believe that the author of such disturbing fiction as “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle could deliver slices of wry like the above passage to the same primary audience—American housewives and mothers—as Erma Bombeck would later do.

But these humorous essays on her family—whose tone could also be modulated to ironic short fiction like “Charles”—helped pay the bills for Shirley Jackson, as she raised the four children of herself and her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman.

And they can still be appreciated by readers—even those who, in October, might be more tempted to seek out the macabre novels and short stories that make Jackson a crucial link between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King.

For a brief description of the life and career of Jackson, see my blog post from six years ago, on the centennial of her birth.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Coneheads,’ in Which Alien Parental Units Wrestle With a Human Dilemma)

Prymatt Conehead [played by Jane Curtin] [hearing that her daughter’s porky teenage swain, Ronnie, was acting inappropriately on a date]: “He was behaving like a flarndip?”

Connie Conehead [played by Michelle Burke]: [Stopping her crying, in confusion]: “Flarndip?

Prymat: “A masher, a hustler, an uninvited grasper of cone.”

Beldar Conehead [played by Dan Aykroyd]: [Overhears this, erupting] “FLARNDIP?”— Coneheads (1993), screenplay by Tom Davis, Dan Aykroyd, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, directed by Steve Barron 

Somehow, for nearly three decades, this movie escaped my notice. Then this past Friday, while channel-surfing, I came upon it, at a point when I needed it most, and surrendered constantly to great, swelling belly laughs.

Quote of the Day (Fran Lebowitz, Reassuring High-School Seniors in the Home Stretch)

“Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”—American humorist Fran Lebowitz, "Tips for Teens," in Social Studies (1981)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Freaks and Geeks,’ on Whether a Goddess Can Be Boring)

[Sam Weir is trying to explain to his two fellow high-school “geek” friends, Neal and Bill, why he would think of breaking up with his girlfriend Cindy, a cheerleader-goddess.]

Sam Weir [played by John Francis Daley]: “She's kind of boring. It's weird hanging out with her friends. And, I mean, all she wants to do is make out and stuff.”

Neal Schweiber [played by Samm Levine]: “I'd kill to be that bored.”—Freaks and Geeks, Season 1, Episode 17, “The Little Things,” original air date July 8, 2000, story by Jon Kasdan, Judd Apatow and Mike White, teleplay by Jon Kasdan, directed by Jake Kasdan

Joke of the Day (Nora Ephron, on Teens and Dogs)

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”—Screenwriter-director-essayist Nora Ephron (1941-2012), I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006)

Nora Ephron died on this day five years ago in New York, the city of her birth. Although she may have seemed almost predestined for a Hollywood career as the daughter of stage and screen-writing team Henry Ephron and Phoebe Ephron, I think that the woman responsible for, among other films, Sleeping in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail really found her natural genre in the essay, where her wry voice was unfiltered and most original.

Most parents, I suspect, would agree with her quote above. An even higher percentage of women, I think, have, over the years, nodded their heads in agreement over this one: “As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.”