Quotes About Youth

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.

But seven-year-old Werner seems to float. He is undersized and his ears stick out and he speaks with a high, sweet voice; the whiteness of his hair stops people in their tracks. Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on.

It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and bees humming in the window boxes. String and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.

Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick is new too. He's from Berlin. His father is assistant to an ambassador. When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he's scanning the sky for something.

Frederick runs hard. But the fastest boys are greyhounds, harvested from all over the nation for their speed and eagerness to obey, and they seem to Werner to be running more fervently, more conclusively, than they have before. They are impatient to find out what will happen if someone is caught.

They lie on their stomachs and page through comics, feeling the pleasure of being outside of school, glancing at each other now and then as if curious to learn whether their friendship will continue to exist in another place.

We all grew up before we we're grown up.

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

from Volkheimer to Werner.

Before she turns fourteen, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead.

They said it's for boys. Or very adventurous girls." She can hear him smiling.

Membership in the State Youth becomes mandatory. The boys in Werner's Kameradschaften are taught parade maneuvers and quizzed on fitness standards and required to run sixty meters in twelve seconds. Everything is glory and country and competition and sacrifice. Live faithfully, the boys sing as they troop past the edges of the colony. Fight bravely and die laughing.

Tre ragazzi passano ridendo e Max li guarda con intensità. Su un muro butterato e chiazzato di licheni è fissata una piccola lapide di pietra. <>Ici a été tuè Buy Gaston Marcel agé de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 aout 1944. Jutta si siede per terra. Il mare è gonfio, grigio d'ardesia. Non ci sono lapidi per i tedeschi morti qui.

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom. Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them—squires, monks, conscripts, cadets.

The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.

We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.

It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.

archaeologists have found the inscription ?????????? scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive. ??????????, ????? ? ????, "the boy is beautiful.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you.

In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort.