Quotes About Youth

I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral, said the Wizard. In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.

One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/

How children love the broken thing! And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

She added, perhaps to herself, You have to become old and ugly before anyone listens to you, and then they don't, because you're ugly and old.

Some realities are too onerous to be borne by nations, let alone by children.

How she wanted to put away adult things and go back to seeing through a looking-glass, darkly.

Those boys and us—we only seem to be sharing a life here. The young are entirely separate. They are someplace else right now. They won't join us in our lives, really, until they are grown. And by then, who will they become? People I don't know. And I may not even be here when they get here.

Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself—that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

It seems there is no shortage of regret among the young — but then, they are young, they make mistakes. They have time to correct them and the courage to admit their failings aloud. Adults should try it. But frankly, I think it's a miracle that adults can manage to speak to one another at all, and that the entire species doesn't take a universal vow of silence. Some days I wish it would.

Childhood, which seems endless to children, is the most finite span of moments in the history of a life.

She was of an age that took other people's lives to be pretty fictions, useful merely for adorning the invisible membrane that contained her own singular and glorious existence.

We don't go on having babies, that's quite apparent. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it - we're slow learners, we women - we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But *they* can't learn at all.

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we're slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But

So young, he knew nothing about aerodynamics, except how the heart could lift and lift.

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth.

I am forty. [...] I know who I am. The treachery of possibilities that threaten to swamp a young guy -- I negotiated them. I'm on the other side. The safe side. Why then do I remember the perilous moments with such fond affection?

I do not listen when anyone uses the word "immoral". In the young it is ridiculous. In the old, it is sententious and reactionary. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.

I do not listen when anyone uses the word 'immoral'. In the young it is ridiculous. In the old, it is sententious and reactionary. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.

And, once the innocence of childhood is lost, no adolescent has ever regained it.

Also there was the thrill, basis indeterminable, which made Glinda shy, and caused her to rush her words, and to speak in a false high voice like an adolescent. How quickly you could be thrown back to the terrible uncertainty of your youth! For

You're in the finest hands. He's a very capable soldier." "He is an old man with a white beard." "He is a young man inside, and strong.

Another word for poverty of choice is innocence.

There are times in the lives of most of us," observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, "when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.