Quotes About Youth

the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Ellen was in her late thirties, plump, her face unblemished still. It was as though whatever marks being in the world had left upon it up to the time the aunt vanished had been removed from between the skeleton and the skin, between the sum of experience and the envelope in which it resides, by intervening years of annealing and untroubled flesh.

the young girl who slept waking in some suspension so completely physical as to resemble the state before birth and as far removed from reality's other extreme as Ellen was from hers

I'm fifty; all I know is that people nineteen years old will do anything, and that the only thing which makes the adult world at all safe from them is the fact that they are so preconceived of success that the simple desire and will are the finished accomplishment, that they pay no attention to mere dull mechanical details.

the face which had long since forgotten how to be young and yet absolutely impenetrable, absolutely serene: no mourning, not even grief

It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.

Adesso, affacciato alla finestra, sente soltanto gli immensi, interminabili insetti, respira il caldo, immobile, ricco odore maculato della terra, pensando a quanto, da giovane, da ragazzo, amava l'oscurità, a come la notte camminava oppure si sedeva fra gli alberi. Allora il terreno, la corteccia degli alberi, tutto diventava vero, ricco, selvaggio, evocava strani e minacciosi mezzi piaceri, mezzi terrori. Ne aveva paura. Lo spaventava; amava aver paura.

looking out upon the whatever ogreworld of that quiet village street with the air of children born too late into their parents' lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults

To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world

and Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.

La simple idea de su defección le produjo cierto regocijo, como el de un niño que decide hacer novillos.

A] generation ago ... the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one's equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one's entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policeman.

each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession not with time's dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen.

Young folks and womens, they aint cluttered. They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they cant listen. They aint got time. They're too busy with facks.

Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don't like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard, they are too busy because they don't know if they'll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired, so you dont mind admitting then to folks that are worrying about the same thing that aint worth the worry that you are yourself.

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

the persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones - the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before.

The function of this school is custodial. It's here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.

Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler's favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion.

Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.

Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.