Quotes About Youth

Sometimes I think hanging out with boys would be an awful lot simpler. And then I remember how much they like to make fart jokes, and I change my mind again.

Andrea's really good-looking," I say to Kendra in a low voice when I hear the Vespa and the jeep start up. "Whatever." She shrugs. "The weird thing? I love to, you know, hook a boy on the line, but when I do? I don't care about 'em anymore. I'm funny that way.

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains.

An old man's errors mattered both more and less than a young man's. More because there was less time to undo them; less because there was less time to endure their consequences.

la CRUELDAD y la COBARDÍA, rufianes gemelos contratados e instigados en la oscuridad por la MALICIA, señalarán al unísono todos tus errores y flaquezas:——sí, mi querido muchacho, hasta los mejores ahí somos vulnerables;—

You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.

Age is artificial. It's soulless. It doesn't matter one bit.

Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.

For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.

Mr. Freeman sighs. No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!

I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy -- old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length.

My parents didn't raise me to be religious. The closest we come to worship is the Trinity of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. I think the Merryweather cheerleaders confuse me because I missed out on Sunday School. It has to be a miracle. There is no other explanation. How else could they sleep with the football team on Saturday night and be reincarnated as virginal goddesses on Monday?

The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.

To keep up appearances, I stomp my room and slam the door.

What do you miss about being alive? The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles - p. 272.

I don't know what I'm doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I'll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I'll think about a career path.

Everyone is born a freak, notes Hayley. Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. . . . Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly.

i decapitated dandelions all morning, leaving carnage and death strewn into my path.

I watch some kids ask the cafeteria ladies to sign their books. What do they write: Hope your chicken patties never bleed? Or, maybe, May your Jell-O always wiggle?

I am almost a real girl the entire drive home. I went to a diner. I drank hot chocolate and ate french fries. Talked to a guy for a while. Laughed a couple of times. A little like ice-skating for the first time, wobbly, but I did it.

Once upon a time there was an eighteen-year-old girl who dragged her butt out of bed and hauled it all the way to school on a sunny day in May.

I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.

Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up.

Bologna girl, that's me.