Quotes About Youth

Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp's feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I'll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school.

We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls' chests

obviously, dr, she said, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

For instance, as the police arrive, there are girls lined along the street, girls in miniskirts, thigh-highs, and halter tops. (The sea wrack Milton hoses from the sidewalk every morning includes the dead jellyfish of prophylactics and the occasional hermit crab of a lost high heel.)

So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were reasons on my side for this as well. Whatever it was that I was was best revealed slowly, in flattering light. Which meant not much light at all. Besides, that's the way it goes in adolescence. You try things out in the dark. You get drunk or stoned and extemporize.

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It's all about learning to share. It's about sharing your toys.

Certain "advanced" girls understood. Others, like me, thought: knife wound, bear attack.

There's a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

Mr. Lisbon continued to go to work in the mornings and the family continued to attend church on Sundays, but that was it. The house receded behind its mists of youth being choked off

Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them

Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we had been to infatuated to see it.

At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn't completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the mossblackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.

His beauty had left him without cunning

He was a boy composed of pieces just loosely held together, and the centrifugal spin of this latest terror could pull his loose bits apart. No magical belief in hummingbirds and glowworms could put him back together if that happened

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him.

photo developers everywhere are likely the reason my entire generation didn't devolve into total chaos.

worry that younger women are striving so hard to present a compelling story via images that they're ignoring the substance that makes the story true. Ultimately, they're going to end up really bitter later in life (and not the good kind of bitter that sells books). My message to these women is this—if you want to avoid regrets later, give yourselves a break now and just be real. Enjoy the mess. Revel in the imperfection.

This is the time of my life I have been waiting for, for as long as before I was ever even alive to be here now in this two-seat, no-roof car with bare-chested Trip in the seat at the wheel beside me, calling me "My Amnesia Girl," doing sixty, sixty-five, seventy down a bent-out-of-whack coastal cliff road, bump-pressed against the belt buckle of the Hitchhiker's leather pants I have been sitting on since the last gas tank fill-up at the freeway detour off-ramp.

I understood that at eight years of age, but I had forgotten it by eighteen.

It never fails to amaze me how many beautiful young women with so much promise and talent wind

Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn't mean is isn't real, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, doesn't mean it doesn't matter, but basically, we're talking a practice swing in the big game of love.

You know who you remind me of? The kid cop in Lethal Weapon 3. You know, the one who says, 'it's my twenty-first birthday today', and right away you know he's dead meat?

Lane and Zack got hitched. So while it might not be very punk rock to be too young to drink legally at your own wedding, it's certainly handy to have the thumbs up from God to get laid.