Quotes About Youth

Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t 's and b 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x .

Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.

She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.

I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.

There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

Madeline began hearing people saying Derrida. She heard them saying Lyotard and Foucault and Deleuze and Baudrillard. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm.

Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had.

The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he got into the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn't have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full conversation with the world. Somehow you forgot about is as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

Throughout the act, headlights came on across the field, sweeping over them, lighting up the goal-post. Lux said, in the middle, I always screw things up. I always do and began to sob. Trip Fontaine told us a little more. We asked him if he put her in the cab but he said no. I walked home that night. I didn;t care how she got home. I just took off. Then: It's weird. I mean, I liked her I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.

I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long.

It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be managed, as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

Na kraju nije bilo bitno koliko su godina imale niti da su bile cure, nego samo da smo ih voljeli, a one nisu ?ule naš zov; ne ?uju nas ni danas, dok ih prorije?ene kose i salastih trbuha iz ku?ice na drvetu dozivamo da iza?u iz soba, kamo su otišle da zauvijek budu same - same u samoubojstvu, a samoubojstvo je dublje od smrti - i gdje mi nikad ne?emo na?i djeli?e da ih nanovo sklopimo.

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls' bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex.

Obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen year-old girl.

Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls.

None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn't have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display.

the melancholic remainder of our lives (a place the Lisbon girls, wisely, it began to seem, never cared to see)