Quote

Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexuality, and that breaks my heart, because they're going to have to - high school's hard enough to overcome. Middle school is hard enough to overcome when we get out of it. They say life is what you spend your time getting over because of high school, you know what I mean?

Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passions - art, music, sports, what have you.

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

Nothing could be as hard as middle school.

I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn't a difficult thing to pull out.

My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.

There's a lot of middle school behavior in Washington, D.C. I look at that and I say, 'I've seen that before,' it was just with a 14-year-old.