It’s normal to like guys who seem to like you; it’s normal to want to be loved.”Kami raised her eyebrows. “I’m sixteen,” she said. “I’m not looking for love.”“Oh,” said Liz. “Uh, what are you looking for?”“Cheap thrills, mostly,” said Kami.

Remember sixteen – when all the world was new and a lifetime stretched before you like fresh snow just waiting for your footprints?

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet.

Remember sixteen - when all the world was new and your life stretched out before you like fresh snow waiting for your footprints?

Remember sixteen - when all the world was new and your life stretched before you like fresh snow waiting for your footprints.

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen.

From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.

Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.