Quotes About Youth

Pretty girls make graves

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures ...

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.

What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?" She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?

and nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact, not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

Now she is cuddling and kissing me all over and...Cody walks right in just as we're cooing (or haved cooed again) on the bed and he yells our Ah just what I like to see in the morning, boys and girls!

I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields...

You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you

Beautiful girls Just primp But beautiful boys Do suffer.

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionaires, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races. I go with him.

As for his hobby, drawing, he was better at that than most artists alive today and I always knew he was really a great young artist pretending to be withdrawn so people would leave him alone, also so people wouldn't ask him to get a job.

here we are, by the side of the river - once upon a time we had a notion we were Romeo's.

To this boy of New England the May morning was like faint music in the woods again, some unspeakably exciting foregathering of events far in the deep shade of morning pines, all of it stirring there. He could hear it all faintly in the woods from far away, from across the fields and pastures, in the cool misty morning air, and he wanted to go there too.

I dunno, remember when we were in East St. Louis with George, and Jack you said you'd love those beautiful dancing girls if you knew they would live forever as beautiful as they are? (p. 173)

You know women," confided the fruitseller, "they love little cats... they always love the helpless things. But when it comes to men, you know, they'll want them cruel." The youth stranger smiled thinly. "Am I right?" laughed the man, slapping the youth on the back and reentering his store with the kitten, chuckling to himself. "Maybe so," mumbled the youth to himself. "How the hell should I know?