Quotes About Youth

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.

It's a drag, not being young, but at least I don't have to take a test tomorrow morning.

I came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances, when it was all there waiting. Now they seep out of school – to what? To nothing, to fuck-all. The young (you can see it in their faces), the stegosaurus-rugged no-hopers, the parrot-crested blankies – they've come up with an appropriate response to this, which is: nothing. Which is nothing, which is fuck-all. The dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground.

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.

We're nowhere near young enough for the present war, but when the world war comes—we'll be just right to fight it. We are, after all, a superb physical specimen. Our feet aren't flat. Our vision is clear. We're not clubfooted or Marxist or nuts. We have no conscientious objections or anything of that kind. We're perfect.

barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically

Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate.

So this was all you got:the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a black suit and the secular obsequies.

That's why I tell the children not to chew gum. First it's gum, then rock music, then marijuana and . . .

Por ese motivo la minería era un arte y una ciencia, se dijo; porque los mineros morían jóvenes, como los artistas.

He never signed anything ever again, because he didn't need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.

Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.

But the judgement of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

And it was right for those youngsters to know that in a nation like France, no defeat was ever final, no fate was ever foreordained, that even amid the ruins and corpses of defeat, rebirth and recovery and renewal could always come.

This magical song took them all far from the muted peace of the suburban blocks they were familiar with, far, farther back to their youth, when they were smooth skinned, slim and sassy, when they walked the city streets with swinging hips, when their worlds delivered pearls.

When I was nineteen, she said, I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.

Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.

Youthful dreams are precious things. They ought not to be dashed as foolish and unrealistic just because they are young dreams. Innocence ought not to be destroyed from any callous conviction that a realistic sort of cynicism is better.

It was hard to leave. But it was impossible to stay. He was leaving from choice because he was young and energetic and adventurous and had long wanted to carve a life of his own. He was going to new possibility, new dreams. But he was leaving behind places and people. And though, being young, he was sure he would see them all again some day, he knew too that many years might pass before he did so. It was not easy to leave.