Quotes About Youth

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.

If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading.

For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it, Old One, do we not? For ever and ever . . . so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die. Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.

Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible.

I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence once lost, is lost forever.

In our time, we couldn't find a virgin—of either sex—over the age of sixteen.

This is bullshit. You think I care what other people think? What does age have to do with it? Why can't you be that girl? As for what I want to do with my life, why can't I figure that out with you?

I'll have you know I was wildly in love with Ford long before he was dangerous. No one truly loves like a fourteen-year-old girl.

It's good to learn stuff. It keeps us young.

Zane liked her. At least Chase thought he did, and she was gone enough on the man to be willing to accept the gospel truth from a seventeen-year-old.

I didn't know about foster kids aging out of the system. There should be a better plan than simply tossing a foster child out when they turn eighteen, even if they're not done with high school.

Less than four percent of foster kids graduate with a college degree, compared to 46 percent in the general population. And don't get me started on the number of young women who end up pregnant by age twenty-one.

For many listeners, the exciting new music we discovered when we were young becomes the reliable playlist we stick with in middle age.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

La foto del amante escondida en la billetera de una mujer casada, el cartel fotográfico de una estrella de rock fijado sobre la cama de una adolescente, el retrato de propaganda del político prendido a la solapa del votante, las instantáneas de los hijos del taxista en la visera: todos los usos talismánicos de las fotografías expresan una actitud sentimental e implícitamente mágica; son tentativas de alcanzar o apropiarse de otra realidad.

I think that the old-young polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

If you want to preach, young man, you ought to wear some kind of clerical costume so people would be warned. In my mind, there are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. I hate le misérabilisme. I'm in the shining business, not the darkening business.

Everybody's in love when they're eighteen. And everybody gets dumped.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, "America's greatest contribution to the world is the summer camp." Anyone

think about kissing boys all the time. Me and all my friends. We even practice making out with our pillows.

In place of the youngster he'd once been was an angry, cynical young man made dangerous by the fact that he had nothing more to lose. In destroying an innocent boy, the Germans had unwittingly created their own worst enemy.