coming-of-age

But sometimes you have to make a decision with your heart instead of your head, and that__ what I did. I know I__e made the right decision even if it takes my brain a little while to catch up to my heart.

As I watch Nicholas make his way back to his truck, I know one thing: this boy is going to make my life very interesting. I feel as if a fragment of the old me broke away tonight and disappeared, and I__ finally, truly beginning my new life.

Don't think about that. Just believe I'll be okay.

Samir loves Joe__ face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cliffs and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life__ weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe__ moods _ all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there__ the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.

There is a secret layer of humanity that lies just beneath the surface of man, a secret layer where our fears and insecurities hide, that when touched in this secret place men and woman are somehow liberated.

I remember thinking that I could disguise the way I am by somehow filtering my expression for the sake of juvenile social acceptance or I could say to the world, __ere I am, if you don__ like it, don__ clap._ -Boys of the Fatherless-

We are brilliant shades of light, we can not be contained"-Boys of the Fatherless-

Something__e wondered later if it was simply his youth__omething that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

I'm too old to be ignorant as I am." --Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.-Deuce, (183)

I work in a restaurant in an airport in Taiwan. I am eighteen years old and I don__ like my job because everyone gets on planes and leaves. And I want to leave too.

Iâ__ve lived for nothing and might soon die for less. My Life, Part One will be cancelled midway through the first season

I had come to the conclusion that everyone took sex far too seriously. I mean, it's only sex.

Life was like that when you were fifteen and knobby-kneed and you only had a handful of choices. Your world was small and cruel and narrow-minded and breathtaking.

But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli__ gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man's feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with white trim.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...