Quotes About Youth

Until you're prepared to kill your parents, you're not really prepared to change the country, because our parents are our first oppressors.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

As a child, the only clear thought I had was "Get candy."

Life is truly a ride. We're all strapped in and no one can stop it. When the doctor slaps your behind, he's ripping your ticket and away you go. As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair's messed, you're out of breath, and you didn't throw up.

And that's when I realized, when you're a kid you don't need a costume, you ARE superman.

Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.

That's the thing about people you loved. They disappeared on you. I didn't know much at the ripe old age of fifteen and a half. But, for better or worse, I knew that.

Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens , and there really wasn't anybody to ask.

It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.

Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"?

It can make you sad to look at pictures from your youth. So there's a trick to it. The trick is not to look at the later pictures.

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

la conoció en la escuela, cuando aún era niño, nunca le hablo, siempre la miró en el recreo, sentado en la baranda del jardín, que adornaba con rosas el patio de juegos;

Nos conocimos en segundo de bachillerato. Desde ese tiempo fuimos novios.

abril— mes frio por naturaleza, y el cual me llena de melancolía pueril, de aquella inmadura relación con la vida.

La locura de los años mozos, nos abrumaba por aquellos días, escondidos en habitaciones de hotel, envueltos en el sudor de otros amantes.

I'd been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.

Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.

So at about age 10, Albert started to teach himself. He was going to read as much about science as he could.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

Life's a shock to the young. Shock to have an old man for a father instead of an angel. Shock to eat ham gravy instead of dew drops. And to like ham gravy. That's the worst shock of all. Find yourself fitting into this sorry world.

In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.

Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don't know.