Quotes About Youth

Like young fern shoots my child's fingers curled. I did not expect, in the fifth month, frost.

First kisses didn't necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.

Little kids, little problems. Wait till you've got drugs and sex and social media to worry about.

This was not the career she'd dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

Love is a decision?' 'That's right. A decision. Not a feeling. That's what you young people don't realise. That's why you're always off divorcing each other.

When you were young you talked about 'falling in love' with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind.

She made the right choice for the girl she was then.

When you were young you talked about "falling in love" with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind. She could have fallen in love with Connor. Easily. Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.

Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self.

It looked like girls were controlled by their feelings but the opposite was true. Girls had excellent control of their feelings. They spun them around like batons: Now I'm crying! Now I'm laughing! Who knows what I'll do next! Not you! A boy's emotions were like baseball bats that blindsided him.

Miss Barnes clearly didn't know what in the world to do. She was twenty-four years old, for heaven's sake.

Your daughters will leave this school as confident, resilient young women." Ms. Byrne was off, delivering the private school party line. Resilience. What crap. No kid was going to go to school in a place that looked like freaking Buckingham Palace and come out of it resilient. She should be honest: "Your daughter will leave this school with a grand sense of entitlement that will serve her well in life; she'll find it especially useful on Sydney roads.

It looked like girls were controlled by their feelings but the opposite was true. Girls had excellent control of their feelings. They spun them around like batons: Now I'm crying! Now I'm laughing! Who know what I'll do next! Not you! A boy's emotions were like baseball bats that blindsided them.

Janie eating. Janie sulking. Janie with her friends. Including him. That boy. His head turned away from the camera, looking at Janie, as if she'd just said something smart and funny. What did she say? Every time, she always wondered that. What did you just say, Janie? Rachel pressed her fingertip to his grinning, freckled face, and watched her mildly arthritic, age-spotted hand curl into a fist.

there was something in your children that could bring out the child in yourself.

forty being the "precise age where you're old enough and young enough to handle a revelation".

Her darling little tech-savvy, consumerist savages.

It made Alice sick with guilt when she thought about what they had put the children through that year. She and Nick had been so young, so full of the earth-shattering importance of their own feelings.

All that shiny love stuff doesn't seem relevant anymore. That's for other younger, thinner, happier people, and besides which, it's not actually possible for a dried apricot to shine.)

I'd pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth's age again for just one day. I'd dance like Olivia's butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I'd walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air. And I'd probably have sex!

Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn't eat too much chocolate. Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self. And maybe sometimes Young Alice had a point.

been walking home from the hairdresser's, feeling gorgeous, and a gaggle of teenage girls walked by, and the sound of their strident giggles made her send a message back through time to her fourteen-year-old self: "Don't worry, it all works out. You get a personality, you get a job, you work out what to do with your hair, and you get a boy who thinks you're beautiful.

Now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self. And