Quotes About Youth

Did I ask ye how old you were today? Get out of my face before I give ye a good clout to the ear.

She had run away from home plenty of times, but that was when she was only a kid. It wasn't running away this time, she figured. It was leaving.

You seem to have an uncommon knowledge of young people. May I ask if you are, or have been, a teacher? Oh no! Mrs Carey remarked with a smile, I am just a mother- that's all!

In truth what had drawn my eye was the rear view of a young man stripped to the waist and plying an adze along a beam. I could not help but admire his muscled back.

because he stared at me with such a look as made him seem much better-looking even than he likely thought himself, and it is very bad to encourage young men into believing you find them handsome.

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

Do you think we are truly ever old?" she says. "I mean, inside ourselves, old? Ready to be old?

The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures.

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cells' sensing that she would grunt out strong young.

It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.

daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother's hair gray.

Jess wouldn't argue that, but he saw her as a beautiful wild creature who had been caught for a moment in that dirty old cage of a schoolhouse, perhaps by mistake.

He didn't want to die. He had hardly begun to live.

there was one path across Boston Commons that a young man must not ask a young woman to take unless he meant business. Which path was that? she asked Holmes. "Ah," she remembered the elderly doctor saying, "if I were only fifty years younger I would show you.

I stayed with the Navajo for several years. I had no idea how to get home! But one day another captured New Mexican arrived. He was a boy, just twelve or so, but he told me he knew how to get back to the nearest town. He was determined to run away, and when the time came, I—I ran with him.

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly.

It makes me happy, and also sad, to think that this is where playful language is cherished now, and where the verbosity that I and my clever friends prized in our youth has gone to reside: the slums. Words don't cost a penny; during the Depression, they were all many of us had. I used them to make a fortune.

Nostalgia for what's new: The French probably have a word for that.

In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn't that what we always mean by in my youth?