Quotes About Youth

In high school the priests had cautioned us against the danger of books. "The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it already is, Marzek". I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so that I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education-The Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you, (2) study what they condemn

Watch the shagging, you little bastard!' he shouted. 'Fucking look at it!' Hot sun was burning the

We all do things we regret. It's part of growing up.

She held out her hand and we sat there together like grade-school kids on a field trip. "Line up in twos and no talking." Life itself is a peculiar outing. Sometimes I still feel like I need a note from my mother.

My do now consisted of some really nifty spikes on top. I looked like a punker, but it was kind of fun, if you want to know the truth. Next thing I knew I'd be getting my ears pierced and chewing gum in public, social sins my auntie had always warned me about, along with red nail polish and dingy bra straps.

believe I lasted three Sundays before my aunt was asked to take me down the street to the Presbyterians.

We didn't know what would happen next: that was our great gift. The gift of youth. The thing we miss, it seems to me, no matter what we've made of our lives, as we get older. When we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last.

Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill

She was almond-buttery with sweat and sun, her face corrugated with a thousand caramel wrinkles and her hair flour dusted, but the rest of her seemed decades younger.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac .

At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn't free.O

She'd started out the morning hating all young men. Then she'd become so angry with her law professor that she'd quit school. Finally, she'd gone to eat rice with a man she didn't know.

these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

Their culture was saturated with messages about killing South Koreans and Americans and references to horrifically gruesome acts, and it seemed as though they spewed those messages back out unthinkingly, perhaps in the same way that young Americans mimic behavior they see in violent movies and video games. There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.

Our Job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody

But today when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

I'm 16 years old. Let me get my learner's permit first. then I'll worry about lifetime commitments

Nothing good happened to Romeo or Juliet.

But today, when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

For that tiny instant, I was every 16-year-old in history, not knowing what the skies foretold about my future.

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ?

After the paper rush subsided, the older boys sometimes struck deals with the younger newsies to buy their leftover papers. 'One of the big guys would say to one of the little guys, 'Hey, punk, want to buy me out tonight?' said Philip Marcus. 'An' the little guy said yes. It was his ass if he didn't.

Some of the younger boys looked forward to the chance to sell papers in a good spot, but most were simply afraid to refuse the bigger boys. I made a deal with a guy, said Philip Marcus. I said I'd buy him out. But when I looked at all the papers he had left, there was more than I thought I could sell. But there wasn't two ways about it. I had to buy them and I did. I started to bawl. And while I was standing there bawling, I sold all them sheets.

So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.