Quotes About Youth

the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.

i had spent four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place.

Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they're as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who'll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right.

At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.

kids now don't have sense enough to know what they don't know.

High School is like a sickness, but trust me, soon the fever breaks and you get over it. ~She's Come Undone

I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two....I may never find one of the young men....He has been gone so long. The odds, I'm afraid may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.

Once I asked Ma who'd taken the picture, but she couldn't remember. Maybe Ma's death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma's young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.

When he emerged, I'd stand on the stool amidst the steam and the aroma of uncapped Old Spice, watching my face wobble and drip in the medicine cabinet mirror.

Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an "Edge of Night" fan. Sometimes I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle. "I hope you don't sit like that in school," she said. "It's unladylike.

I don't begrudge the kids their hormones or their illusions of immortality.

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest

A Glimpse A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. - Song of Myself : 6

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination, Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the musical rain

There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young.

Nunca hubo más comienzo que ahora, ni más juventud o vejez que hay ahora; y nunca habrá más perfección que hay ahora, ni más cielo ni infierno que hay ahora.