Quotes About Youth

The Casa Hogar Elim orphanage was about a dozen miles from the Texas border town of Laredo and a world away for us kids from church youth group. There were about a hundred of us that first time I went. On the bus from the airport in San Antonio, we leafed through magazines, showing each other a Ford Mustang convertible we had to have and the red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger ad for the white polo that was different from every polo we already had because this one was Tommy Hilfiger.

I was a seventh grader, twelve, and I had tagged along to so many church camps and vacation bible schools as a preacher's daughter that I was excited to be with kids and believers my own age. One of the best parts of every church camp stay was when we sang together. People who were once strangers sang hymns that felt they like were written for just that shared moment.

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They're who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This

As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article "Students of Virginity," on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, "There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete's sake.

Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain."Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a "bare stem"?

By fetishizing youth and virginity, we're supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren't women at all- they're girls.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They're who we are, even if so much of it is a performance.

War es denn nicht auch manchmal schön gewesen? Hatte er immer nur die Lüge gespürt, die hier umging, und die böse heimliche Gewalt, die aus ganzen Kindergenerationen gehorsame Bürger machte? Es war manchmal schön gewesen, aber nur trotzdem.

Um die Hauptsache nicht zu vergessen, bitte ich euch in dieser hoffentlich unverlierbaren Stunde: Vergesst eure Jugend nicht! Das klingt jetzt, wo ihr noch Kinder seid, recht überflüssig. Aber es ist nicht überflüssig. Glaubt es uns! Wir sind älter geworden und trotzdem jung geblieben. Wir wissen Bescheid, wir beiden!

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

I don't want to get old." "You won't get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels." "No. When one no longer loves.

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

Extraordinary creatures you young people are, altogether. The past you hate, the present you despise, and the future is a matter of indifference. How do you suppose that can lead to any good end?

Educationalists who think they can understand the young are enthusiasts. Youth does not want to be understood; it wants only to be let alone. It preserves itself immune against the insidious bacillus of being understood. The grown-up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children's clothes. We may feel with our youth, but youth does not feel with us. That is its salvation.

Wir sind verlassen wie Kinder und erfahren wie alte Leute, wir sind roh und traurig und oberflächlich - ich glaube, wir sind verloren.

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.

I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.

What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?

I want that quiet rapture agin. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick join the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.