Quotes About Youth

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth...

She found beauty in the children.

She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it's less vigorous, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.

He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility.

He was in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain—unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.

Yet all this while the power of thought, the pull of conscience, were feeble beside Alverna's youth. It was his first love; the first time in his life that he had been roused to through away caution and dignity.

You poor kids! You talking children, that don't know anything about anything that matters! Don't you see? I can't play either of your games. I'm ME! I'm going to be me! Oh, if you do love me a little, let me be me! Good-by.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.

the youngsters in canoes were now singing My Old Kentucky Home. Zenith was still in the halcyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the duty of young people to be hard and brisk, and knowing about radios, jazz, and gin.

Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.

There are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their youth, at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed, or betrayed, or became abortive through opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale of true love.

Those who remarked in the countenance of this young hero a dissolute audacity mingled with extreme haughtiness ... could not yet deny to his countenance that sort of comeliness which belongs to an open set of features, well formed by nature, modeled by art to the usual rules of courtesy, yet so far frank and honest, that they seemed as if they disclaimed to conceal the natural working of the soul.

Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.

Hear this, young men and women everywhere, and proclaim it far and wide. The earth is yours and the fullness thereof. Be kind, but be fierce. You are needed now more than ever before. Take up the mantle of change. For this is your time.

It really is the year 2007. Which means I must be... Oh my God. I'm twenty-eight. I'm old.

Youth is still where you left it, and that's where it should stay. Anything that was worth taking on life's journey, you'll already have taken with you.

When I was your age, if a boy behaved badly, one simply scored his name out from one's dance card. (Sadie Lancaster - to Lara Lington)

That girl is going to go far. I have no idea in which direction- but she'll go far

When he was EIGHT. Anne, do you know what teenage parties are like? What if they knife each other and have sex on the trampoline?

I look along the endless line, squinting in the sunshine. I'm twenty-nine years old. I can go anywhere. Do anything. Be anyone I like. There's no rush, I say at last, and reach up to kiss him again.

Io non mi sono mai sentita vecchia. Nessuno si sente vecchio. [...] Io mi sono sempre sentita così: una ragazza di vent'anni, per tutta la vita. L'aspetto esteriore è solo... un involucro»