Quotes About Youth

Childhood is really age-less. It's just a matter of how much time you can invest in it.

I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.

Living on the street as a kid changed the way I looked at everything. It was a different time and while it had its dangers, it was nothing like it would be today. It was the Summer of Love and there was a real sense of community among us. We were hippies who looked out for each other instead of trying to rip each other off. We only had to watch out for the police who liked to roust us just on general principles, and the kids who came in from the suburbs to do a little hippie-bashing.

A boy is a dangerous animal.

Why would affluence make him mad?" "Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.

For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

Having buck teeth in junior high," she rounded up unsteadily, "must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It's like, what's going on? Why doesn't anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won't be a shock for me. It'll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.

Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children's lunch boxes.

Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

I wasn't sure. In those days I still held wholesomeness to be suspect.

In 1999, and a mere ten days after a certain Thursday , eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold planted bombs in their Littleton, Colorado, high school and went on a shooting rampage that killed one teacher and twelve students, while wounding twenty-three, after which they shot themselves. So young Kevin—your choice—has turned out as American as a Smith and Wesson.

But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain...

There is a look in his eye, a heavy look that makes him seem older, as though in one night he has lived one hundred lifetimes. And it makes him appear even more handsome.

Elaine, I remember the first time I met you. You were so young, so scared. It nearly broke my heart to see you so.

What saddens me is the corruption of youth and beauty, and the loss of soul, which is only replaced by money.

Hi," Caitlyn said. "Hello." "I'm Caitlyn." Mathilde grinned. "The Wild West girl who rode bareback! Yes, I know. The whole school knows! Can you shoot a gun, too?" Caitlyn's cheeks heated in embarrassment. "Urg," she gurgled, "no.

Looking back on their own teenage years, most adults feel grateful that there's no easy-to-access document of all the dumb things they did.

Having used you as their emotional dumping ground, they are prepared to return to school and play the part of the good citizen. Indeed, they may be able to act as a good citizen at school precisely because they are spending some of their time imagining the colorful complaints they will share once their school day has ended.

Nick turned out to be a shy boy, uncertain in groups and in new situations, but also very brave, determined to overcome his fear." - Will, as a parent describing his son

I slide down between the sheets beside him, like a secret letter slipped into the safety of an envelope. And dream of ancient places, where everyone is young.