Quotes About Youth

They were sitting on the couch chatting politely with me, not touching, or so it seemed, except that I happened to glance down and I saw that their hands were lying next to each other on the couch, and that Nick was caressing Alice's little finger with his own. I remember being shocked by a feeling of pure envy. I wanted to be Alice, young and lovely, feeling the secret caress of a handsome boy's fingertip.

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.

then wandered off, probably to climb a ladder, because his sons had informed him that seventy was too old to climb ladders, so he liked to find excuses to climb them as often as possible.

It wasn't so much the things that her fourteen-year-old self wanted. It was the fact that she so blissfully, so completely, believed she had a right to want anything.

Nobody had warned her that this would happen during middle age: these sudden, wildly inappropriate waves of desire for young men, with no biological imperative whatsoever. Maybe this was what men felt like all their lives? No wonder the poor things had to pay out all that money in lawsuits.

too young and happy to know that love wasn't enough; too young to know all the ways that life could break you. Their son's death broke her. Maybe a son's death broke any mother.

Ellen had always assumed she would marry young and have a relationship like theirs. She thought she was that sort of person. Traditional. Nice. As if nice girls always found nice boys. As if "niceness" was all that was necessary to maintain a relationship.

Nope, she didn't. So we grow up and leave home, and I hear from my mum that Madeline has married some wanker," said Ed.

Back then he was thinking with his dick.

He looked simultaneously very young and very old, as if all the past and future versions of himself were overlaid on his face.

Connie looked like a young person who had aged a great deal. She was frail, and moved slowly but impatiently, as if she was driving too slow a car. You could tell that once upon a time she'd been the sort of person who never sat still.

Her future back then, thought Cat now, was like a long buffet table of exotic dishes awaiting her selection. This career or that career. This boy or that boy. Marriage and children? Maybe later—for dessert, perhaps. She didn't realize they'd start clearing the plates away so soon.

The teenagers glanced up briefly from their phones and then instantly dropped their heads again as if there were magnets on their foreheads.

I'll tell you something, something important. Write this down. You ready?' 'Yes, yes, I'm ready.' 'Love is a decision.' '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. No offence, dear.

There was a certain age, Cecilia had noticed, before people stooped or trembled, but where they didn't seem to trust their bodies in quite the same way as they once had.

Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky.

Connie had been far to busy having a good time, remembers Sophie.

The year Lyn turned twenty-two someone switched her life over to fast-forward and forgot to change it back again. That's how it felt.

I had bad endometriosis when I was younger, and a doctor told me I'd have a lot of trouble getting pregnant.

Some elderly people look like they've always been old, but Connie looked like a young person who had aged a great deal.

Nowadays we label children too quickly as bullying, when in fact they can only behave like children.

Her boys were gorgeous little darlings. Her boys were feral little animals.

The broader unquestioned premises upon which my own culture founded its view of the human condition, such as the one that Unhappiness is as legitimate a part of experience as happiness and necessary in order to render happiness appreciable, or that it is more advantageous to be young than to be old: those still took me a long time to pry loose for reexamination.

Boys always get the best eyelashes; it's like some kind of cosmic law. And half-breed kids get some kind of extra help there from genetics, too.