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Quotes About Youth

The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal.
~ Edith Wharton
All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.
~ Edith Wharton
Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her--of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.
~ Edith Wharton
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.
~ Edith Wharton
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't.
~ Edith Wharton
It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.
~ Edith Wharton
And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.
~ Edith Wharton
The stage was thought to have a shaping influence, for the most part a bad one, on youthful character and conduct in much the way television is thought to have in our day.
~ Edith Wharton
Odbacila sam par dobrih prilika na samom po?etku – pretpostavljam da to svaka devojka uradi, a znate da sam vrlo siromašna – i vrlo skupa.
~ Edith Wharton
It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.
~ Edith Wharton
The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
~ Edith Wharton
She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?
~ Edith Wharton
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He
~ Edith Wharton
Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shift-fronts and fresh glacé gloves.
~ Edith Wharton
What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming out ball.
~ Edith Wharton
She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.
~ Edith Wharton
he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.
~ Edith Wharton
Undine leaned close enough for her lowered voice to reach him. 'Can't you understand that, knowing how they all feel about me and how Ralph feels - I'd give almost anything to get away?' Her father looked at her compassionately. 'I guess most of us feel that way once in a way when we're young, Undine. Later on you'll see going away ain't much use when you've got to turn around and come back.
~ Edith Wharton
Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glacé gloves.
~ Edith Wharton
Cuando un hombre amaba a una mujer ésta siempre tenía la edad que él quisiera; y cuando dejaba de amarla se convertía en demasiado vieja para los hechizos o en demasiado joven para la técnica .
~ Edith Wharton
La diferencia es que estos jovencitos dan por sentado que van a conseguir cuanto se proponen, mientras que nosotros casi siempre dábamos por sentado que no debíamos conseguirlo. Aunque me pregunto si algo que uno está seguro de conseguir le haría latir tan locamente el corazón.
~ Edith Wharton
No debes pensar que una chica sabe tan poco como imaginan sus padres. Una oye, una se da cuenta..., una tiene sus propios sentimientos e ideas.
~ Edith Wharton
It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.
~ Edith Wharton
some twenty boys sat behind wilfully collapsible desks, occupying their brief intermission in various more or less destructive and useless ways.
~ Edmund Crispin