Quotes About Youth

Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.

The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.

I)f you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living?

I am sure old men forget what it was to be young and to be wholly in love. Not even I can remember those breathless moments. That's why they give old men important jobs and big salaries and orchestras to lead. To pay us back for the terrible loss we have sustained.

Because a boy who could read would sooner or later come upon some book that would give him an idea, and a boy with an idea could accomplish almost anything.

A young boy who has not fallen desperately in love has missed getting started in the world of feeling. At any age love is wrong only if it means nothing... You must be the criterion of any love...There's only one test... Does the love you feel make you a bigger and a stronger person?... (I)f any love makes you stronger and more determined to share, then it's much finer than most people ever attain.

Many people die at 25 but are not put in the coffin until 75. The learning stopped for them early.

Every night I woke up in dread, terrified of yet one more insecure tomorrow. I wasn't even brave enough to kill myself. And the truth was only leading me closer to a death agony. The agony that youth was gone, and for the rest of my tomorrows I was finished, crushed by my responsibilities, and the carved out hole of loss inside of me.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.

You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.

Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.

On days like this, Cass said, suddenly, I remember what it was like--I think I remember--to be young, very young. She looked up at him. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs--which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete. James Baldwin

And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

One of the reasons. . . I think that our youth is so badly educated--and it is inconceivably badly educated--is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn't be something they cannot think about. If there is one thing they cannot think about, very shortly they can't think about anything.

Fonny liked me so much that it didn't occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn't see them. I didn't know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.

EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late

Thought the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as the plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives like flies.