A Quote by Maya Angelou
Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.
Related Quotes
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.
I have tremendous respect for teens who navigate the quagmire that is modern religion. If there is any message in my books, I want it to be that it's okay to ask questions, and it's okay to come up with a belief system all your own. Teens who change their worldviews in the face of tremendous social pressure are heroes to me.
I didn't have a rigidly enforced religious parental pressure, but I did have a few years in my mid-teens of turning to religion, and it was very meaningful to me.
Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.
Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.
The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.
One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them.
To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.
To be ones self and unafraid whether right or wrong is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.
The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.
I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity--to one's self.
To survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation and dedicate yourself to the present moment rather than wallow in denial.
I pride myself in being able to survive just about any situation on stage now. I can handle pressure.
Surrender is not something that you can do. If you do it, it is not surrender, because the doer is there. Surrender is a great understanding that, "I am not." Surrender is an insight that the ego exists not, that, "I am not separate." Surrender is not an act but an understanding.
I think, for many teens, a fundamental fact of the teenage experience is that you're in between this childlike state, in which you're told you're completely unqualified for just about anything in the adult world, and this adult world, where you're being told you have to be responsible, and you're just trying to figure out where you stand.
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