Quotes About Youth

Let her wake as when she close her eyes. That was all Jenny asked for. That was all she begged for on this March night that was perfectly equal to the day, unique in all the season. Let her be the same sweet girl, unburdened by gifts or sorrow.

Some things are best remembered the way you want to remember them, like this road, these stars, this girl right beside him as they walk into the center of the cold night, looking straight ahead.

Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets.

Don't think this won't happen to you,' she hissed at all the pretty young girls passing by. 'Youth is fleeting. It's nothing but a dream. I'm where you're going. I'm what you'll be.

It was too exciting a time to be tied down to school.

If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you'd wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you'd have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse of Boston.

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life.

She had the ability to know what people were thinking, and therefore understood that boys who were rude were usually fearful and that quiet girls often had a lot to say.

Each time I opened the window in my bedroom I smelled salt and fish and human desire. I knew what I wanted: my own place in the world, not a path I took because I was under my father's command but one I had chosen for myself. I wanted to know how other girls my age wore their hair, for mine was still in braids as if I were a child. How had they learned to dance, choose silk dresses from the shops, form friendships?

being young will slip through your hands and you will be left standing there, you who were once so young, not recognizing yourself or your life. "I'd like a mirror

They both always wished for the same thing when they were sitting on the roof of the aunts' house on those hot, lonely nights. Sometime in the future, when they were both all grown up, they wanted to look up at the stars and not be afraid. This is the night they had wished for. This is that future, right now. And they can stay out as long as they want to, they can remain on the lawn until every star has faded, and still be there to watch the perfect blue sky at noon.

To be young and alive was a glorious thing. When you possessed it, you were likely unable to fully comprehend that it was a marvel and a gift, no matter your circumstances.

Rebecca had been young when she met her husband-to-be, at an age when she saw only what the outside of a man revealed. She was inexperienced enough to assume what they had was love because she wanted him, and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.

It was possible, Richard knew, to be away from home too long, to forget all the things you once knew by heart. He didn't want just his father, he wanted the boy he used to be, someone who could be comforted by the sound of his parents talking in the next room, someone who refused to come into the house for supper until after dusk because that was the hour when deer mysteriously appeared in the driveway.

The truth is, Helene was always the troublemaker. She had that bad-girl twinkle in her eye, and she always dragged Shelby along, whether it was the time they were caught shoplifting makeup at the Walt Whitman Mall or the time they took the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan and didn't come home till two a.m.

Any woman can make a mistake, especially when she is young, and sees the wrong man through a haze so that he appears to be something he's not.

She had the distinct impression that something was beginning and something was ending; there were just so many days like this left to them. Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they'd be, grown women who'd forgotten how long a summer could last.

Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they'd be, grown women who'd forgotten how long a summer could last.

I'll pretend to be who they want me to be.' He grinned then, and she saw his youth. 'But it won't work. In the end I'll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.

cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man's beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man's last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child's.

THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even