Quotes About Youth

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.

It was then, for the first time, that Will saw the kind of help Marcus needed. Fiona had given him the idea that Marcus was after a father figure, someone to guide him gently towards male adulthood, but that wasn't it at all: Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult.

Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older;

So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

I don't think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom.

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

Sometimes Marcus sounded as though he were a hundred years old, and it broke Will's heart.

I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you're old enough to know better?

But something was going to give. He was having a shit time at school and a shit time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a shit time all the time, apart from when he was asleep.

Pero lo que resultaba raro a su edad era que uno se pasaba la mitad del tiempo soñando con lo que podía suceder y la otra mitad intentando no pensar en eso, y en ambos casos uno se encontraba aprisionado en un periodo vital que no parecía importar demasiado, a mitad de camino entre la infancia y lo que implicara la madurez consolidada. (...)Y tal vez eso no tuviera ningún futuro, pero era un presente, y en eso consiste la vida.

Here's how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life.

Telling a boy in your class that you liked Joni Mitchell was really another way of saying, "If the worst comes to the worst and you knock me up, it'll be okay.

Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition

It's just that in the old days, when you eventually got your pictures back from the drugstore, you never went backward through time. You shuffled through the twenty-four holiday snapshots, only seven of which were any good, put them in a drawer and forgot about them.

I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains. I

All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.

People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty.

and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.' If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?' Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.

There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.

But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love...Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.

Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.