Quotes About Youth

Mother told her she looked just like the duchess of York, but younger. Lucille returned the compliment by remarking that Mother looked just like Queen Alexandra, but younger. And Dad wondered aloud what was wrong with good American people: "You look right miserable, Dad," I told him. "So do you, Alexander, but younger," he replied.

Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades' secret meaning. At twenty-five, he's back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He's lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country

God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right now doing wrong.

When he thundered up the steep staircase [of the institute], two steps at a time, there were few of us younger ones that could keep pace with him. The peace of the library was often broken by a brisk game of pingpong, and I don't remember ever beating Bohr at that game.

Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.

The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . 

The power the old exert over the young is the power to send the young to war -- flesh in its perfection dropped into a hellish maze of stimulus and response in order to defend an old man's phrase. A phrase! What? The American way of life? Yes. It galls me to say it, but yes. This paragraph costs me nothing. And yet I know it cost the life of a boy or a girl with a ready body and a mind not ripe. N one will come to question me this evening.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones.

Juniors" on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, "out of it," or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.

He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: "Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.

Rico'nun 'hurda' tan?m?na uyduÄŸunu söylemek güç olsa da, o kendisinin teknik bilgi aç?s?ndan 'gerileme dönemine' girmek üzere olduÄŸunu düÅŸünüyor. Bu noktada, toplumun gençliÄŸe yapt??? vurguyla, kendisinin yaÅŸlanma konusundaki fikirleri birleÅŸiyor. Toplumsal önyarg?, kiÅŸinin içindeki güçten düÅŸme korkusunu körüklüyor.

You are old, Father William—

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.