Quotes About Youth

What happens to my generation is, we don't just watch The Breakfast Club[*] two times while it's in movie theaters. We watch The Breakfast Club sixty-nine times between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and convince ourselves that The Breakfast Club is a genius movie. You have this wrapped-up nostalgia and regurgitation and overcompensation of mediocre shit . . . and I directly tie that to the video store.

A ten-year-old boy doesn't want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn't feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else's failure.

Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.

We'll never be as young as we are tonight.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.

Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life

Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

Every high school has its Romeo and Juliet, one tragic couple. So does every generation.

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel's face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful . . . Tyler told me later that he'd never seen me destroy something so completely.

Kill me if I ever look that Bad . . . Dude, what are you saying? . . . On the TV? That is you, dude. From like five years ago.

Lovely, forgettable faces, born to flirt and fuck and die.

Artificial over stimulations seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.

He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.

The mistakes we make in our youth, she said solemnly, we pay for with the rest of our lives.