Quotes About Youth

No, writing has not changed me for the better at all; I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth. What value to me will these discontented pages be? The book, the vow, are worth no more than one is worth oneself. One can never be sure of saving one's soul by writing. One may go writing on and on with a soul already lost.

childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face

Soon space became filled again, and dense, like a vineyard just before vintage time, and we flew on, escaping from one another, my galaxy fleeing the younger ones as it had the older, and young and old fleeing us.

En la plaza está la pequeña pared de los viejos que miran pasar la juventud; el hombre está sentado en fila con ellos. Los deseos son ya recuerdos. (Ciudad Isadora)

Eu chegara ao limiar da adolescência e ainda me ocultava entre as raízes das grandes árvores do bosque para me contar histórias. Uma agulha de pinheiro podia representar para mim um cavaleiro ou uma dama ou um bufão; movimentava-a diante de meus olhos e me exaltava em relatos intermináveis. Depois ficava com vergonha dessas fantasias e fugia.

There is a place where spiders make their nests. Only Pin knows it. He's the only one in the whole valley, perhaps in the whole area. No other boy except Pin has ever heard of spiders that make nests. Perhaps one day Pin will find a friend, a real friend, who understands him and whom he can understand, and then to him, and only to him, will he show the place where the spiders have their lairs.

Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.

In gioventù ogni libro nuovo che si legge è come un nuovo occhio che si apre e modifica la vista degli altri occhi o libri-occhi che si avevano prima.

A partir de entonces, cuando se veía al muchacho en los árboles podíamos estar seguros de que mirando delante de él, ocerca, se veía al salchicha Óptimo Máximo trotando con la barriga en el suelo. Le había enseñado el rastreo, la muestra, la cobranza: los trabajos de todas las especies de perros de caza, y no había animal del bosque que no cazaran juntos.

Ci si mette a scrivere di lena, ma c'è un'ora in cui la penna non gratta che polveroso inchiostro, e non vi scorre più una goccia di vita, e la vita è tutta fuori, fuori dalla finestra, fuori di te, e ti sembra che mai più potrai rifugiarti nella pagina che scrivi, aprire un altro mondo, fare un salto.[...] scrivendo non mi sono cambiata in bene, ho solo consumato un po' d'ansiosa incosciente giovinezza.

Io, invece, in mezzo a tanto fervore d'interezza, mi sentivo sempre più triste e manchevole. Alle volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

I was yearning to follow him, especially now that I knew he shared in the enterprises of that raggedy gang of boys, and it seemed to me that he had opened the gates of a new kingdom, to look at not with fearful distrust but with comradely enthusiasm.

I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it, the past hidden in that besieged village.

You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students' hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.

When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusc-pulp, damp and happy.

Anche l'ingenuità è vita, anzi, il vero esordio fresco e fragrante della vita.

Quizá no es el libro que hubiera querido escribir cuando adolescente, pero definitivamente sí, es el que por aquel entonces quería leer.

Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility.

Kiddo,' he said tiredly, 'you have to realize, a sizable number of the population gets its start in a back seat, that's just life.

a vision from when they were young and unmarred by what lay ahead of them in life. Memory does that, unerring as a spotlight.

High schools remind me of high school, I can't help it. I graduated twenty years ago, but all it takes is the sound of the first period buzzer going off or the smell of floor wax and it is 1985 all over again, when I am skinny and self-conscious.

Os valores institucionalizados que a escola inculca são valores quantificados. A escola inicia os jovens num mundo onde tudo pode ser medido, inclusive a imaginação e o próprio homem. Mas o crescimento pessoal não é coisa mensurável.

America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese.