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Quotes About Youth

Some things, like innocence, only go one way.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
If there's one thing I learned growing up, it's that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
I overheard her tell my mother that it didn't matter anyway, because we were entirely too young to understand a term like indecent exposure. She didn't realise that children file away such words, awaiting definition.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Kids do stupid things. Even kids with good parents do stupid things. They're kids. No matter how you raise them, they're going to take a cruise through Stupid Land.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
This is one of the advantages of dying young. Everybody you left behind will need your help
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Willie sat with her elbow on the table, her hand shading her eyes. "I wish you knew how remarkable you are, Ella. So much deeper than anybody else I know. Even the grownups." "Is that good, Willie? To be deep?
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it's not the kids' fault.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Younger you are, the more you're not sure what's the right way to be in the world. The more you think you might be getting it wrong, the more sensitive you'll be about it. As you get older, like me, you stop caring so much what people think.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
I know a man," he said, "A man who taught me that the reason people aren't happy is because they have these ideas about what the world should be. And the world is never just what they think it ought to be. If the world has to be a certain way for you to be happy, then you'll never be happy. Heck, I'm only twelve and even I know that.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
When an eleven-year-old boy can be beaten within an inch of his life for walking down the street with the wrong friend . . . ," he said, ". . . well, I just don't see what chance we have, Lucy. We'll get somebody killed.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
Hey, I was fifteen. Drama was my contribution to the world.
~ Catherine Ryan Hyde
The doorkeeper of the Norfolk Club was a man by the name of Cartiledge. As a youth, his heart had been romantic, his head had been poetic and his political affiliations had been conservative to an extreme. He hadn't planned on a life of holding the door open for the aristocracy, and years of bowing to nobility had given him a sense both of what Karl Marx had been on about, and of profound, world-weary depression. Nothing interesting happened at the Norfolk Club.
~ Catherine Webb
Who are you?" "I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious." "But you're so small!" "Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that's the truth.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
One of the awful secrets of seventeen is that it still has seven hiding inside it. Sometimes seven comes tumbling out, even when seventeen wants to be Grown-Up and proud. This is also one of the awful secrets of seventy.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn't it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second?
~ Catherynne M. Valente
We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Breaking things heals a great many hurts. This is why children do it so often.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
~ Catherynne M. Valente