Quotes About Youth

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.' But I don't feel part

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.

All'improvviso mi sembra che una delle differenze tra la gioventù è la vecchiaia potrebbe essere questa: da giovani, ci inventiamo un futuro diverso per noi stessi; da vecchi, un passato diverso per gli altri. da Il senso di una fine

melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance)

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.

Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.

he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love's nature and workings to be.

When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

Dicho de otra forma. Yo tenía diecinueve años y sabía que el amor era incorruptible, a prueba del tiempo y del deterioro.

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.

For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

Quando si è giovani-parlo per me almeno-si vogliono provare sentimenti simili a quelli di cui leggiamo nei libri. Passioni che ti sconvolgono la vita, che creano e definiscono una realtà nuova. Più tardi, mi pare, vogliamo dai sentimenti qualcosa di più pratico e modesto: che siano di sostegno alla nostra vita per come è diventata e si manifesta. Vogliamo che ci garantiscano che va tutto bene. E che c'è di male in questo? da Il senso di una fine

time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. Nowadays

At least by now he was familar with the patterned patternlessness of the life he was submitting to again. His reappearance was greeted not with happiness or relief, but with a blithe lack of surprise. Because such a return was always going to happen. Because young men must be allowed their delinquencies, but shouldn't be congratulated when they returned to a place they should never have left.

I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant.

It seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don't reflect on it much