Quotes About Youth

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

All the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn't think they had anything to teach me.

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. […] I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it […].

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

and I felt their eyes on my flat, virgin stomach.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that--in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day-- I had never been really happy again.

Something about the frank, guileless blue eyes, the beautiful young bodies, the brief scent of the dying flowers smote me like the clean quick cut of a knife. And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.

Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn't think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut.

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed a ton more weight to make me sleep.

I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.

turned and grinned at the littlest, with big brown eyes and peeling nose, pink and brown patches of skin, tow head, husky voice; he catapulted back into a bank of dry seaweed on the afterdeck and the other little boys laughed; big, bright awake eyes, dancing, merry; curious, and shy too; patched faded overalls; lean and brown and agile; pokes and fisticuffs. Mice and squirrel and cocker spaniel faces.

What is more wonderful than to be a virgin, clean and sound and young, on such a night? ... (being raped.)

We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quietly die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.

She personifies the word cute. She is Cinderella and Wendy and Snow White.

must work for a state in myself which is stoic: the old state of working & waiting. I have had the most unfortunate hap: the bright glittery youth from 17 to 20 and then the break-up and the dead lull while I fight to make the experiences of my early maturity available to my typewriter.

The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.

Verbal programming: What did you hear when you were young? Modeling: What did you see when you were young? Specific incidents: What did you experience when you were young?

I miss being young. I miss being young and strong. Young and fast. Young and in love. Nothing like it. Old love is good, too. But you get the feeling that the world mainly just wants you out of the way.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see. I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.

The young feel tired at the end of an action— The old, at the beginning.

I grow old...I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk along the beach. I have the heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.

A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.