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Quotes About Youth

Basically, I think I just want them to know that the world is deep and filled with variety. That there are infinite possibilities in the world they live in and that they are a part of this world. Perhaps it's enough just to say that the world is rich and precious and that they hold it in their hands. I honestly made this film just wanting to tell these young girls, "Don't worry, you can make it all right.
~ Hayao Miyazaki
We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.
~ Heather O'Neill
They often got my file mixed up and thought that I had gone to juvenile detention for being a prostitute. All I had done was date a pimp.
~ Heather O'Neill
When you're young, sex doesn't mean as much, it isn't sacred. Children make the best prostitutes because they're th emost perfunctory about the whole encounter. The whole act is like a dare, like kissing a frog or something. It's nasty while it's happening, but you forget about it soon afterward. And sometimes it isn't even that nasty. Whatever it is, it's so far from love.
~ Heather O'Neill
Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different.
~ Heather O'Neill
People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it. They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.
~ Heather O'Neill
Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you were twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.
~ Heather O'Neill
Linus Lucas was fourteen years old, a number that made the spoons fall right out of our mouths.
~ Heather O'Neill
As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.
~ Heather O'Neill
That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of.
~ Heather O'Neill
Being judged by society makes you disregard it altogether after a while. Jean-Michel didn't know that he shouldn't get a twelve-year-old drugs. He didn't even really know what a twelve-year-old was.
~ Heather O'Neill
What happened if an unwanted child gave birth to an unwanted child? It was as though she were in a hall of mirrors, except that instead of getting smaller in each one, she got younger and younger.
~ Heather O'Neill
They had this angry look about them, as if they had been falling off swings all day.
~ Heather O'Neill
Zwölf ist ein wunderschönes und bemerkenswertes Alter; um diese Zeit fangen Kinder an, große Töne zu spucken und zu überlegen, wie sie es allein schaffen könnten: genau wie Engel, unmittelbar bevor sie aus dem Himmel vertrieben werden. Sie haben solch unschuldige und gefährliche Ideen.
~ Heather O'Neill
He didn't want to read the newspaper or listen to the radio anymore. He didn't want to be a grown-up. There are some people who are just no good at it.
~ Heather O'Neill
People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.
~ Heather O'Neill
There was this professional hockey player that I liked. I imagined him watching at the parade and falling in love with me. It didn't occur to me that he probably wasn't interested in twelve-year-olds.
~ Heather O'Neill
They all dressed like crack addicts. A boy wore a white leather belt as a tie.
~ Heather O'Neill
But having a young parent meant you had to pack up your stuff in an hour and run away from a twenty-two-year-old from Oshawa who was going to be mad at you for having sold his guitars.
~ Heather O'Neill
Marie felt an incredible coldness. She had stopped pursuing, even on an imaginary level, the one person she loved in the world. Sadie was no more. Sadie was dead to her. But she was not mourning Sadie, she was mourning the part of her that had ever loved Sadie. She had put aside a love for a father and now she was setting aside the love of her youth. In the coming days she knew she would become a monster. She stood on the balcony letting the metamorphosis happen.
~ Heather O'Neill
It was good to have an imagination if you were a girl and living in Montreal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Intelligence was what she needed. But she never listened to anyone.
~ Heather O'Neill
But that age … exerts on us An almost terrible charm, Like the memory of things seen And a life lived in dreams.
~ Heinrich Heine
First poems! They must be written on casual scraps of faded paper, interspersed here and there with withered flowers, or a lock of blond hair, or a discolored piece of ribbon, and the trace of a tear must still be visible in several places ... But first poems that are printed, in livid black and white, on dreadfully smooth paper are poems that have lost the finest points of their sweet, virginal charm, and now arouse a ghastly feeling of distaste in the author.
~ Heinrich Heine
Funny how at twenty-five you worry about not being taken seriously and take being a sex object for granted. Later you take being taken seriously for granted, and worry about not being a sex object.
~ Helen Fielding