Quotes About Youth

Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity

Little boy, Full of joy; Little girl, Sweet and small; Cock does crow, So do you; Merry voice, Infant noise; Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

Selfish father of men! Cruel, jealous, selfish fear! Can delight, Chained in night, The virgins of youth and morning bear. 'Does spring hide its joy When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower Sow by night, Or the plowman in darkness plow? 'Break this heavy chain, That does freeze my bones around! Selfish, vain, Eternal bane, That free Love with bondage bound.

When I think of my youth, he went in, what we took for granted, what we assumed was for ever certain, for ever permanent.

any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child's fringe has something suspect about him

Thousands of German prisoners were being shepherded back to holding pens and it was both striking and disturbing to see how young they were – teenagers in the main, wispy adolescent fuzz on their chins and cheeks, all in uniforms that seemed far too large for them, borrowed from men.

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.

True, 'tis an unhappy circumstance of life that love should ever die before us, and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.

Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do -- but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven't done so -- and now I'm old. It's too late. It has gone past me -- I've lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!

She was herself in that moment of life when, to the middle-aged observer, at least, a woman's looks have a charm which is wanting to her earlier bloom. By that time her character has wrought itself more clearly out in her face, and her heart and mind confront you more directly there. It is the youth of her spirit which has come to the surface. I

The executioner proper, the official who would place the nooses around the necks of the condemned, was a practiced hangman, his occupation begun in his youth in Texas, where he apprenticed under the regular hangman.

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible

I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.

It was only as he put his hand on the door that he became aware of complete silence beyond it, a silence which he at eighteen knew that it would take more than one person to make.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement.

So you see how much effort a man will make and trouble he will invent to guard and defend himself from the boredom of peace of mind. Or rather perhaps the pervert who deliberately infests himself with lice, not just for the simple pleasure of being rid of them again, since even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts; but because even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing, even lice.