Quotes About Youth

I'm young, but I'm already screwing up my life. I'm smart but not enough - just smart enough to have problems.

There's so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I'm not and other people - younger people - are.

I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I HAD incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I was the Shift so bad. I'm waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It'll be like a miracle within my life.

I was a kid; I had plenty more to do; I'd been through some crap but I was learning from it

Jamie Smart has gone home and Adrian sits on the curb at the edge of the field, the bike propped against a lamppost. He can see the back garden. He's drinking a can of Fanta. He's feeling pretty good. He's six years old. A van pulls up. The worried-looking driver gets out and jogs across the quiet road. He said, "Mate—what's your name?

Complaints about the demise of society and the "youth of today" also tend to be timeless. Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent title: Negative.

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.

Clarke remembered having his first experience with global communication when he worked at the Bishops Lydeard Post Office in his teens. "I was night operator for quite a long time at Bishops Lydeard, and one night there was a call from New York—very rare in those days. The call came by radio, of course; it was long before there was any telephonic cable. The operator in Taunton must have detected me listening in, and told me to unplug. I was probably weakening the signal.

Y]ou're young. Young takes care of everything.

A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex.

He looked like a big baby goose with acne. This

This was why only the uptight, small-minded kids in school got involved in politics, I thought. It's not about changing the world. It's still about what lunch table you sit at.

So while the kids played in the room next door, I had sex for the first time and discovered that it was like masturbation, but a lot more work.

Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going on the turf, can stop one mugging, can keep one promising youth from becoming a drug addict, so long as the force that drives the owners of our civilization is away from those who own nothing at all.

American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, 'Isn't anybody on my side?' It's also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, 'I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow.

Where have all the young men gone? Gone to soldiers, every one.

The summer of '63, Keith reflected, had been called the last summer of American innocence

Sou um menino que vê o amor pelo buraco da fechadura. Nunca fui outra coisa. Nasci menino, hei de morrer menino. E o buraco da fechadura é, realmente, a minha ótica de ficcionista. Sou (e sempre fui) um anjo pornográfico

What do you think, Mr Alleyn? If there's another war will the young chaps come at it, same as we did, thinking it's great? And get the same jolt? What do you reckon? I'm afraid to speculate, said Alleyn.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated 'modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

The American trait I dislike the most is their casual approach to life. No one thinks ahead further than the next minute, no one has the courage to look life squarely in the eye, difficult things are always avoided. No youth of my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with… one of the main reasons why I have had difficulty making friends with any American.

in Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, where 45 percent of all civilian deaths were people aged fifteen to thirty-five.97 Death was not caused by the influenza virus itself so much as by the body's immunological reaction to the virus. Perversely, this meant that individuals with the strongest immune systems were more likely to die than those with weaker immune systems.

The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. —WILLIAM JAMES1