Quotes About Youth

Girls are always at their best smiling.

Nobody can know ... just how heavy a burden trying to protect another human being can be. I was still a child. I couldn't have understood the real meaning of my promise.

That boy said there's a corpse buried beneath each cherry tree. That's why they bloom so prettily. He smiled when he said that. Who was he?

You starving street waif! No, you're too old to be a waif! You starving high-school-aged waif!

He's but a boy…with innocent eyes.

Billy would recall years later that the thing wrong with his first foster home, and with every foster home, was that he was never sat down and told why and for how long.

A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there's no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It's not a bad feeling, child. That's what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D'you see?

For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.

Youth inhabits his face like a hermit crab its borrowed shell. He will outgrow his shelter sooner than he thinks. Only then will he know what it is to be naked.

The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.

Men. Young men. Legal age, mind you. But young nonetheless. And it's not what you think. When we meet, we make … magic.

I don't remember nineteen," Will said. "Or twenty, come to that. I have a very vague recollection of twenty-one—" He laughed. "But you get to a place when you're so high you're not high anymore.

Every part of the dead kid's anatomy was swaying hypnotically. The tongue, hanging from the open mouth. The head, lolling on its slit neck. Even the youth's penis flapped from side to side on his plucked groin. The head wound and the open jugular still pulsed blood into a black bucket. There was an elegance about the whole sight: the sign of a job well done.

A young woman sat on the step in front of him, fiddling with the heel of a strappy shoe. She wore a white cocktail dress with a

It was teenage partying on adult paycheques.

Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.

During his term at Nickel, the Mexican boy sidestepped the squabbles that embroiled the rest of them, the uncounted disputes over psychological turf and endless encroachments. His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook's rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.

When they were done hauling, the boys had performed surgery—cut the rotten tissue from the house and plopped it on the tray of the curb.

The white boys didn't get it as bad as the black boys, but they were not in Nickel because the world cared overmuch. Big Chet was their Great White Hope.

the children make of it what they can. What they don't understand today, they might tomorrow. "The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it's right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.

Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament in young and old alike, "to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.

The boy made a fist. He knew what he'd do if the man put his hand on his leg or tried to touch his thing. He'd vowed to sock Freddie Rich in the face many times and then stood paralyzed when the time came, but this day he felt he could actually do it. Drawing strength from the free world.

The boys knew to hide their enthusiasm over little kid things that still had an allure.

Even in death the boys were trouble.