Quotes About Youth

Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.

They say the kids are dumb and so they're teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

I had a girl friend, named Geneva, a kind of loud, raunchy girl ... and she was always into something. Naturally she was my best friend, since I was never into anything. I was skinny and scared and so I followed her and got into all her shit. Nobody else wanted me, really, and you know that nobody else wanted her.

and you could see that Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had - has - that look, that don't-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave.

I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it made me suffer.

those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If he had had a gas oven.

I have not thought of that boy—Joey—for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though 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 a plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it.

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

They say the kids are dumb and so they're teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.

I had one margarita, though we all knew it was against the goddamn motherfucking shiteating law, and Fonny had a whiskey because at 21 you have a legal right to drink.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three—he is a little older than Fonny—he was already running out of familiar faces.

You are - how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.

Real questions can be absurdly phrased, and probably can be answered only by the questioner, and, at that, only in time. But real questions, especially from the young, are very moving and I will always remember the faces of some of those children.

This was the summer in which they all abruptly began to grow older, their bodies becoming troublesome and awkward and even dangerous and their voices not to be trusted.

in the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood.

But I'll tell you the truth,boys, he said. I'd give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It's nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun's in the gettin there. The gettin there.

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars. (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)

How could such a pretty girl become known as the Hag, she wondered. It must be hateful to become old in face and body when you're young at heart and still strong and tough—so unfair for a woman.

those who are young will take risks which even the devil would pass by.

For a woman, old age is never pretty.