Quotes About Youth

Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

Already? How can this be?" I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It's not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.

My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb; what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. the reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind's eye and smell it with your mind's nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you're fairly young, I think, or else it's very difficult to read for pleasure later on.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we're meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don't pertain.

Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he's a monster and goes to this island where it's all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus.

No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he'd still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.

Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

We've got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.

While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

People count too long on the oblivion of children.

How strange that a boy could make a kite of his pants, fly them around the world, and somehow arrive back at the house where everything began.

Then comes the day where Turp is waiting by my locker like a big red balloon fixing to pop.

If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you're giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

It's football. Take that out of high school, it's church with no Jesus. Who would even go?