Quotes About Youth

I said: I must remember this, being small.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn't know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten.

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him.

And times there are when you feel very wise and ageless. You are sunning on the rocks, the water splashing at your feet, when a small chubby freckle faced girl of about ten approaches you, her hand holding something that is invisible, but evidently quite precious. 'Do you know,' she asks earnestly, 'do starfish like hot or cold water best?

Quién es este terrible muchacho azul, extraño y brillante, como caído de una estrella?

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. 'They're cool,' he explained, 'and my mother says they wash easily.

Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures.

And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.

the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again.

It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one-not at all.

I don't know what's the trouble with children these days. They seem to get worse and worse.

I don't see, I said, how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness & devours views from windows (stories, movies, overheard talk &sights in the street, pictures in newspapers, etc.) with continuous feeling she is 'just about', miraculously, to come into her own her own life

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.

But Doctor Gordon wasn't like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was conceited.

But these seniors said most boys were like that and you couldn't honestly accuse them of anything until you were at least pinned or engaged to be married.