Quotes About Youth

You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knos waht warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure youo didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's waht you were born for.

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young. No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.

Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don't know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually.

He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.

So what do we do now?" asked Alai. "The bugger war's over, and so's the war down there on Earth, and even the war here. What do we do now?" "We're kids," said Petra. "They'll probably make us go to school. It's a law. You have to go to school till you're seventeen." They all laughed at that.

Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

One of Ender's toonmates shook his head. "You dumb as a thumb.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.

We may be young, but we're not powerless. We play by their rules long enough, and it becomes our game.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And

Rock and roll is music, said Vanya. Prokofiev is music, Stravinski is music, Tchaikovski and Borodin and Rimski-Korsakov and even Rachmaninov, THEY are music. Rock and roll is smart boys with no respect, YOU are rock and roll.

Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?

Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.

If I believe that, if I accept that, then I've got to sit back and watch while all the opportunities vanish, and then when I'm old enough it's too late.

I'll talk to her, but she's too old—or too young—to listen to reason.

Bingwen didn't argue. What good would it do? When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

And it had to be a child, Ender,' said Mazer. 'You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't commanders, they don't rule over forty other kids

Not bad for two kids who've only got about eight pubic hairs between them, Peter said.

Their young go through a helpless grub stage, too, which lasts longer than some of them think.

but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.