Quotes About Youth

What you saw was what you got, and she did not believe, as some of the other girls said, that the boys at the parties were separate from some sober incarnation of the same boys.

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.

Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn't completely used up your body.

Welcome to Neverland," Peter said, as if this were supposed to be a big surprise. Darla took her hand away from his. "It's smaller than I thought it would be," she said. This time she looked right at him.

It was so much easier when I was young. You got a boyfriend, and you married him. You had some kids, you got older, one of you died, and that was it.''Jeez. No true love?' 'There's always been true love, but in my day, you either talked yourself into thinking you had it, or you talked yourself into thinking you didn't need it.

There's a difference between having maturity and being mature. I'm not ready to be mature. I don't want to see the AARP magazine in my mailbox.

You always did have a problem with undies. Remember when you wet your pants in the second grade? - Joyce Barnhardt

Women grow up wary, and men grow up thinking they're immortal.

When I was young, I got a lot of tattoos, and now they don't look so good. One time, I got drunk and got Eisenhower tattooed on my balls, but now he looks like Orville Redenbacher.

I grew up with Morelli, lost my virginity to him, ran over him with my father's Buick in a fit of justifiable rage, and now years later he's my boyfriend.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

like a kid kicked out of class. humiliated and free.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too.

beautiful girls have certain advantages.

I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?

Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.

What makes classic children's literature so appealing (to all ages) is its undeviating loyalty to the world of the child. In the best children's books, parents never share the limelight with their children; if they are not killed off on page 1, they are cast in the pitifully minor roles that parents play in their children's imaginative lives.

Unlike most other children, - especially unlike those of today - who are eager to become men and women as speedily as possible, I had a terror of growing up, which became more and more accentuated as I grew older.

It was a perfectly average well- adjusted childhood, not a bit unlike that of millions of other individuals.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

For my book, 'Age of Ambition,' I spent time documenting, among other things, the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced.

Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.