Quotes About Youth

We youths say "like" all the time because we mistrust reality. It takes a certain commitment to say something is. Inserting "like" gives you a bit more running room.

All stories are ghost stories, about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted by the living.

Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.

It was amazing that a play that seems dated in this world... A man whose best friend is a six-foot white rabbit... But it caught on, especially with young people - they surprised me most of all.

He had a picture in his mind of Studs Lonigan courageously telling life and the world to stick itself up it's old tomato.

Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst.

A "skinny kid from Hoboken" named Frank Sinatra helped bring an end to the Irish waterfront's golden age.

Church and state knew no separation in the Jersey City of my youth. Together they presided over a strict private morality and a thriving public pilferage.

The Graduate, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical. But he seemed unconnected to traditional values. Alienated from many things, he felt no kinship with fraternity men at his university or with materialistic adults of the older generation.

On one occasion a demonstrator confronted him with a sign, LBJ, PULL OUT LIKE YOUR FATHER SHOULD HAVE DONE. He complained bitterly to Joseph Califano, a trusted aide, that the "thickness of daddy's wallet" offered protection to the privileged and to the hypocritical young men who were pontificating in order to save their skins.94

Having gray hair doesn't matter but having gray matter matters.

Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,To teach the young idea how to shoot.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.

Sometimes she pulled her mother's old college clothes out of the closet (pastel sweaters with moth holes, elbow gloves in every color, an aqua prom dress that—on Harriet—dragged a foot upon the ground).

I was floating around up there like a feather, a trick from early childhood that was fading as I got older.

But still I was young.

Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother's dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

Why hadn't I grabbed his arm and begged him one last time to get in the car, come on, fuck it Boris, just like skipping school, we'll be eating breakfast over cornfields when the sun comes up?

Giovanna d'Arco aveva capeggiato un esercito quand'era poco più grande di Harriet, e nondimeno, il Natale scorso, suo padre le aveva regalato un offensivo gioco di società chiamato Cosa farò da grande? Era un gioco del tutto insulso, teso a indirizzare le future carriere delle partecipanti, ma per quanto bene una giocasse, soltanto quattro sbocchi le si paravano davanti: insegnante, ballerina, madre o infermiera.

She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived.

It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, apallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris-- budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages-- who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he'd been slapped.

After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.