Quotes About Youth

I'm thirty-four. You don't look thirty-four. That's because I'm not married. Mae's smile felt as if it were set in concrete. Marriage tends to age a woman.

drawing of a boy with brown hair and

Girls today, Judy Pressman had told her. They act like they're the first ones to have done any of this. They've got to reinvent the wheel, and make everything ten times harder than it has to be.

Bubbe and Zayde were old and small and wrinkly

Imagine every day you go to a school where the building's run-down and the textbooks are outdated and there's forty kids in every class, and you put your hand over your heart for the pledge—one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all—but you know it's a lie, and there's no liberty for you, no justice for you.

a concentration of young people who wanted to open their minds

seventeen, tells her

And I could see her, after the Sunday we'd spent together, with a plastic bag full of olives and almonds and baba ghanoush swinging from her arm, young and pretty and heading into her brilliant future, smiling and saying, This was the best day of my life.

She is fifteen years old that summer, a thoughtful, book-struck girl with long-lashed hazel eyes and a long-legged body that still doesn't completely feel like her own.

schools—a place to deposit a wayward son

There was a time, long ago, when I used to clamour for the hard work: now I like to give the youngsters a chance.

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago, has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!

In my youth, the question chiefly important to me was—What sort of man shall I decide to be? At nineteen one asks oneself this question; at thirty-nine we say, "I wish Fate hadn't made me this sort of man.

Harris, as he occasionally explains to George and to myself, has daughters of his own, or, to speak more correctly, a daughter, who as the years progress will no doubt cease practising catherine wheels in the front garden , and will grow up into a beautiful and respectable young lady. This naturally gives Harris an interest in all beautiful girls up to the age of thirty-five or thereabouts; they remind him, so he says, of home.

It was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange, wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood.

No; it is not well to rule one's self by theories. We think, when we are very young, that theories, or "philosophies" as we term them, are guiding lights, held out by Wisdom over the pathway of life; we learn, as we grow older, that, too often, they are mere will-o'-the-wisps, hovering over dismal swamps where dead men's bones lie rotting.

It is said that kids have no use for the word 'then'. It is said that only 'now' and 'this minute' count with kids. It is said that kids believe time began the day they were born. How sad if this were true. It would mean kids believe they live on a tiny, isolated island in time. It would mean that when they look back, they fail to see the fascinating human adventure that led up to that day when they were born. It would mean that when they look back, they see...nothing.

I believe that when we give the game back to our children we demonstrate the highest level of love for these great young spirits. When I ask kids why they play sports, they almost never mention scholarships, going pro, or winning a championship. They usually couldn't care less about such lofty goals. They want to have fun, feel challenged, and make friends.

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac.

She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

But thats okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these part, well, just run you're hand under your movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk pups will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is in their instinct.