youth

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
7c40127	Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.	mind youth life stories	Neil Gaiman
e7de926	In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you.	men nature youth women character change empowerment love wisdom pleasing self-discovery truthfulness self-respect self-esteem	Dorothy Parker
e2a4df6	"The Little Boy and the Old Man Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon." Said the old man, "I do that too." The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants." I do that too," laughed the little old man. Said the little boy, "I often cry." The old man nodded, "So do I." But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."	youth poetry old-age	Shel Silverstein
790a068	What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.	poverty youth	Charles Bukowski
129715b	Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; By thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.	shakespeare youth	William Shakespeare
8b3f8cc	It's never too late to have a happy childhood.	youth innocence children	Tom Robbins
ae3b9d5	There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)	youth romance life love scripture	Anonymous
8ebcece	What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.	loneliness daring youth community purpose	Kurt Vonnegut
0bb5f54	It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.	youth truth ideals real nostalgia	W. Somerset Maugham
3ff6d10	When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.	youth the-past	Margaret Atwood
95d995f	may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to know and if men should not hear them men are old may my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if it's sunday may i be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young and may myself do nothing usefully and love yourself so more than truly there's never been quite such a fool who could fail pulling all the sky over him with one smile	youth	E.E. Cummings
6de30c6	I've met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I'm not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months' time, I'll be far away and he'll be just a memory, but I couldn't stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit... Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions.	youth	Paulo Coelho
710b7c4	It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.	youth mccandless inexperience krakauer naivete	Jon Krakauer
21ddacb	Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.	youth life the-rescue nicholas-sparks	Nicholas Sparks
0381fc7	So wise so young, they say, do never live long.	youth wisdom	William Shakespeare
1aae45b	I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate wilfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.	time nature youth love	Robert Frost
02fb7e8	Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.	youth maturity existentialism	Hermann Hesse
5f2576e	I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.	youth	Milan Kundera
80221d4	Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.	youth unrequited-love	Margaret Mitchell
d797f3c	He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.	youth life loss-of-innocence truths growing-up innocence	Cormac McCarthy
e151052	If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.	youth writing talent	Haruki Murakami
dccda48	A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.	bullied loneliness pain youth confidence motivational inspirational adaptation attitude confidence-and-attitude encouragement anger growth outcast introvert bully bullying	Criss Jami
993807a	His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.	youth gravity	Neil Gaiman
07b5c1e	The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world.	youth joy comfort music	Hubert Selby Jr.
04e2134	"He was waving. "Saukerl," she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get."	youth	Markus Zusak
0a42a31	Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.	youth music	Rob Sheffield
f75db62	Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore	youth	James Baldwin
051d5a2	Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.	youth	S. E. Hinton
5ac7146	The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.	wealth youth intelligence inspirational dorian-gray good-looks oscar-wilde stupid-people curse brains gods power	Oscar Wilde
385dd18	I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.	youth love	Daphne du Maurier
fbd850b	It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you it? The answer is, you . I I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.	youth spontaneity	J.D. Salinger
a4efea7	Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.	idealism youth spirit inspirational	Tan Malaka
8879576	In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.	youth greek-mythology	Edgar Allan Poe
fd209fa	He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.	photography youth pictures photos	Jhumpa Lahiri
3cbec93	Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.	youth education inspirational	Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
73cddf9	Life goes on. Get over it. You're still young. It'll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah	youth	David Levithan
bd5b93f	What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.	youth hope	Mary Karr
5786f3e	In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.	war youth	T.H. White
c276615	It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.	youth	Arthur C. Clarke
9c69cae	They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.	youth	Daphne du Maurier
d9f8578	There were books about how to be gay; he'd seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren't any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.	youth romance love unrequited-love	Poppy Z. Brite
0b6f41c	That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.	youth maturity	Philip Pullman
bcba7a2	That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.	youth	Neil Gaiman
e604023	Being sixteen forever sounded good until you really thought about it. Then it didn't seem like such a great prospect.	youth simon-lewis vampire	Cassandra Clare
92ceb6a	There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...	youth	Marcel Proust
6696532	It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone.	loneliness independence youth fear	Charlotte Brontë
8c07ed2	But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.	youth charm	Oscar Wilde
948be75	Children are very wise intuitively; they know who loves them most, and who only pretends.	kids youth love intuitive pretending intuition	V.C. Andrews
d074be2	But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.' 'What?' 'No I don't.' There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to loose.	youth rip los-angeles	Bret Easton Ellis
69ccc45	She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.	influence world youth life	Orhan Pamuk
3babefd	It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.	racism rage youth i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings maya-angelou	Maya Angelou
0211800	When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep	youth heart belief soul	Maya Angelou
c61fdab	I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss	youth life wisdom	Maya Angelou
a6a8fac	It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.	youth	Trevanian
e4c5ed9	Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.	youth interaction conversation	Julian Barnes
257c716	I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.	light youth meaning clay signs meaninglessness los-angeles lost	Bret Easton Ellis
50b2d2f	The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.	youth life	Evelyn Waugh
2f02565	Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.	violence youth	Anthony Burgess
ddcc79a	Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.	youth wisdom experience	Zora Neale Hurston
9e8869d	If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean--even if it did build muscle--whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.	money opportunity youth women life philosophy conundrums groundhog-day self-contradiction tiresias wishful-thinking parents desire old-age	Christopher Hitchens
cd00c9c	I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth--all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.	rebellion words independence youth contrarianism dissidents harold-rosenberg honorifics hormones oppositionism memoirs free-thought dissent	Christopher Hitchens
fac232f	I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.	youth romance optimism soul-mate naivete	Audre Lorde
f5752aa	In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.	youth	Julian Barnes
fe55068	"Seven Ages: first puking and mewling Then very pissed-off with your schooling Then fucks, and then fights	youth limerick seven-ages-of-man middle-age william-shakespeare old-age	Robert Conquest
f382cbc	Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.	youth	Milan Kundera
99b0ce5	"Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea."	youth remorse tea nostalgia	T.S. Eliot
573c41d	She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.	youth elderly	Daphne du Maurier
eb28368	But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.	youth morality understanding-oneself-and-others	T.H. White
5f3fca0	The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.	youth morality books life	Haruki Murakami
c1f047e	Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.	youth machines	Anthony Burgess
0d7d3fc	I had begun to think my ripening body would wither untasted on the vine.	sex youth eagerness horniness virginity	Jacqueline Carey
9ed3579	Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight	youth wild girls running	Vladimir Nabokov
75e3961	What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.	youth kim vest los-angeles	Bret Easton Ellis
756057b	We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.	youth wisdom	Margaret Atwood
336feaf	Whose little boy are you?	racism youth religion god harlem james-baldwin renaissance institution epiphany coming-of-age black church	James Baldwin
3df454c	If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.	youth humor	Oscar Wilde
21d6ec8	Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.	tragedy youth old-age	Julian Barnes
41f82cd	Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.	world youth life temptations	Oscar Wilde
4994d1a	She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.	youth wisdom	Graham Greene
2ed738d	And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...	youth	Neil Gaiman
cdc0a70	When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.	youth hermann-hesse maturity roots soul	Hermann Hesse
0a21afb	"A DEAD STATESMAN I could not dig: I dared not rob: Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue And I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among	irony lies war youth politics truth dishonesty deceit	Rudyard Kipling
d06a26c	God help us for we knew the worst too young.	youth life	Rudyard Kipling
bf43405	Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.	youth	Oscar Wilde
d977f82	The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.	existence youth selling-out maturity existentialism	Paul Murray
7c121fb	I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.	kids youth growing-up teachers teach teaching nostalgia	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
19a91da	I'd sit around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work - the boys with silver earrings and big boots - would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed me Thai food or omelets and undress me and make love to me all night with the palm trees whispering windsongs about a tortured gleaming city and the moonlight like flame melting our candle bodies.	youth dreams love	Francesca Lia Block
89f1e9a	"It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people."	youth opinion	Ian McEwan
99f77be	When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.	youth past memory	Aimee Bender
39bde67	What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.	passion youth contributions	Wallace Stegner
bd22c80	The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.	youth	Isaac Asimov
6106122	...what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.	youth jo-s-boys louisa-may-alcott	Louisa May Alcott
eb769bf	How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.	youth grownup tolstoy child childhood	Leo Tolstoy
c09318c	If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.	youth	Margaret Atwood
43f5a3f	Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?	youth colour ageing perspective excitement	Julian Barnes
787cc9c	The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.	youth young-girls the-blind-assassin margaret-atwood makeup	Margaret Atwood
51d390d	Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.	youth humility	James Fenimore Cooper
4638676	Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.	youth foolishness	Agatha Christie
5ff3feb	"Sister, why do you do that?" "Do what?" "Cage the animals at night?" "Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them." "But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?" "Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together." --	youth family stuffed-animals foster-care runaway memoirs nun neglect	Jennings Michael Burch
54f9252	She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.	time loss youth	Annie Dillard
d67b8af	When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.	youth humor life	Julian Barnes
eeac5e2	The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.	youth despondency social-problems drugs	Spider Robinson
1ab0167	I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?	youth life plans	Thomas Hardy
b5c8c0f	What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugene de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.	youth psychology	Honoré de Balzac
c4888c0	"We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.	youth hope love truth torment honor lost	Rudyard Kipling
791e5f0	Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces. At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. Was the last face the real one? No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)	youth identity man-of-many-faces czech masks self novel	Milan Kundera
d9c35b2	Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk to me about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead!	kids youth death life glare glares glaring money-monetary plead buy pleading baby kid cry talk crying talking child children young dead eyes young-adults	V.C. Andrews
344a82a	It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.	pain youth	Geraldine Brooks
9cca028	In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.	present suicide young-adult youth future imagination beath decision teenager burden childhood dying	Rebecca Solnit
5138a1f	From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell him what to do... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you any,ore; it's his peers.	youth teenagers-and-parents peer-pressure parenting children	Barbara Coloroso
150478b	Nature felt no change, and was ever young.	youth helstone maragaret	Elizabeth Gaskell
e17e3bb	It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.	youth boyhood face tolstoy smile childhood	Leo Tolstoy
e9a32a9	I am life,' the girl said. 'What?' he said, startled. 'To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I'm life and when you're done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don't feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.' Nick said, 'I'm thirty-four and I don't feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.' 'It will,' she said.	youth	Philip K. Dick
cbb1398	Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter	youth	Hermann Hesse
037bdd0	Young people think they never can change, but they do in the most wonderful manner, and very few die of broken hearts.	youth louisa-may-alcott	Louisa May Alcott
22c5d6a	People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.	youth	Louis L'Amour
9ed90d8	The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.	youth love wisdom	Dodie Smith
3e30849	You are young, and rich, and have friends, and at such an age I know it is hard to die!	wealth youth	James Fenimore Cooper
08ff59b	When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.	youth love	Nicole Krauss
3fc97d1	Sometimes, Tiffany thought, I am so with being young.	youth tiffany-aching	Terry Pratchett
1afff43	Buttercup dried her tears and began to smile. She took a deep breath, heaved a sigh. It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning.	passion youth growing-pains experience	William Goldman
bbbfe8c	Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.	tragedy time youth beauty death shabby wrinkled grow mean old young die	Raymond Chandler
70bbab5	They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.	youth growing-up	George Eliot
326df3d	Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks - open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality - and the gift - that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.	youth leadership vigor zeal	Warren G. Bennis
41517f8	We _are_ rich,' said Anne staunchly. 'Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we are as happy as queens and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls - all silver and shallow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.	wealth youth l-m-montgomery	L.M. Montgomery
b7a7090	Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?	youth childhood	Leo Tolstoy
0a00eb3	"The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ("The Pool")"	youth excitement-of-youth excitement night	Daphne du Maurier
d5e05fa	The thing about the old is that we never change so much as the young. We slip in degrees, adding rings like trees--a new wrinkle here, a shade less color there, but the young transform like caterpillars into butterflies. They become whole new people as if overnight.	youth change	Michael J. Sullivan
9dba995	Me--a teenager? If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me, would I need to treat her as near and dear, although she's strange to me, and distant? Shed a tear, kiss her brow for the simple reason that we share a birthdate? So many dissimilarities between us that only the bones are likely still the same, the cranial vault, the eye sockets. Since her eyes seem a little larger, her eyelashes are longer, she's taller, and the whole body is tightly sheathed in smooth, unblemished skin. Relatives and friends still link us, it is true, but in her world nearly all are living, while in mine almost no one survives from that shared circle. We differ so profoundly, talk and think about completely different things. She knows next to nothing-- but with a doggedness deserving better causes. I know much more-- but not for sure. She shows me poems, written in a clear and careful script I haven't used for years. I read the poems, read them. Well, maybe that one if it were shorter and touched up in a couple of places. The rest do not bode well. The conversation stumbles. On her pathetic watch time is still cheap and unsteady. On mine it's far more precious and precise. Nothing in parting, a fixed smile and no emotion. Only when she vanishes, leaving her scarf in her haste. A scarf of genuine wool, in colored stripes crocheted for her by our mother. I've still got it.	youth poetry change growth self	Wisława Szymborska
b8318fe	Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.	time youth	Stefan Zweig
3255d0c	You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you.	youth	V.C. Andrews
9bb0721	And I'll look back at him because I shan't be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I've ever loved, and every time I've been happy.	youth music love nostalgia	Jean Rhys
85e55cf	Mrs. Hammon told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I haven't card for him since.	youth	L. M. Montgomery
b916034	...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.	youth technology	Lynne Truss
5a7debc	...growing pale and sober with the thought that her fate was soon to be decided; for, like all young people, she was sure that her whole life could be settled by one human creature, quite forgetting how wonderfully Providence trains us by disappointment, surprises us with unexpected success, and turns our seeming trials into blessing.	youth louisa-may-alcott	Louisa May Alcott
c2eaf23	I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat.	youth work	Hanif Kureishi
fa19562	To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth	youth	Victor Hugo
e081e39	I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.	youth human-nature	Michael Chabon
44fc828	Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.	youth sorrow wisdom	Hermann Hesse
bd38666	But things are so bad, I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't do something.	feelings youth problems emotions sad	Margaret Peterson Haddix
1826994	Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.u	youth growing-up leaving left-behind growth	Neil Gaiman
305dbff	Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man's way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?	youth lust	Trevanian
a2bd562	Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.	unhappiness grief youth sorrow death tolstoy self-love funeral childhood	Leo Tolstoy
234fed3	In my early teens, I heard about and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was , but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative.	literature youth william-s-burroughs homosexuality coming-of-age queer erotica	Peter Dubé

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Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

mind youth life stories

Neil Gaiman

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In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you.

men nature youth women character change empowerment love wisdom pleasing self-discovery truthfulness self-respect self-esteem

Dorothy Parker

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"The Little Boy and the Old Man Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon." Said the old man, "I do that too." The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants." I do that too," laughed the little old man. Said the little boy, "I often cry." The old man nodded, "So do I." But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."

youth poetry old-age

Shel Silverstein

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What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

poverty youth

Charles Bukowski

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; By thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

shakespeare youth

William Shakespeare

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It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

youth innocence children

Tom Robbins

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There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)

youth romance life love scripture

Anonymous

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What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

loneliness daring youth community purpose

Kurt Vonnegut

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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

youth truth ideals real nostalgia

W. Somerset Maugham

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When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

youth the-past

Margaret Atwood

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may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to know and if men should not hear them men are old may my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if it's sunday may i be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young and may myself do nothing usefully and love yourself so more than truly there's never been quite such a fool who could fail pulling all the sky over him with one smile

youth

E.E. Cummings

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I've met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I'm not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months' time, I'll be far away and he'll be just a memory, but I couldn't stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit... Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions.

youth

Paulo Coelho

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It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

youth mccandless inexperience krakauer naivete

Jon Krakauer

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Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.

youth life the-rescue nicholas-sparks

Nicholas Sparks

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So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

youth wisdom

William Shakespeare

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I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate wilfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.

time nature youth love

Robert Frost

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Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.

youth maturity existentialism

Hermann Hesse

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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

youth

Milan Kundera

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Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.

youth unrequited-love

Margaret Mitchell

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He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

youth life loss-of-innocence truths growing-up innocence

Cormac McCarthy

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If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

youth writing talent

Haruki Murakami

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A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.

bullied loneliness pain youth confidence motivational inspirational adaptation attitude confidence-and-attitude encouragement anger growth outcast introvert bully bullying

Criss Jami

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His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

youth gravity

Neil Gaiman

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The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world.

youth joy comfort music

Hubert Selby Jr.

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"He was waving. "Saukerl," she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get."

youth

Markus Zusak

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Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

youth music

Rob Sheffield

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Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

youth

James Baldwin

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Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.

youth

S. E. Hinton

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The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

wealth youth intelligence inspirational dorian-gray good-looks oscar-wilde stupid-people curse brains gods power

Oscar Wilde

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I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.

youth love

Daphne du Maurier

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It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you it? The answer is, you . I I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.

youth spontaneity

J.D. Salinger

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Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.

idealism youth spirit inspirational

Tan Malaka

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In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

youth greek-mythology

Edgar Allan Poe

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He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.

photography youth pictures photos

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.

youth education inspirational

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

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Life goes on. Get over it. You're still young. It'll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah

youth

David Levithan

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What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.

youth hope

Mary Karr

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In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.

war youth

T.H. White

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It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

youth

Arthur C. Clarke

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They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.

youth

Daphne du Maurier

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There were books about how to be gay; he'd seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren't any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.

youth romance love unrequited-love

Poppy Z. Brite

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That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

youth maturity

Philip Pullman

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That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

youth

Neil Gaiman

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Being sixteen forever sounded good until you really thought about it. Then it didn't seem like such a great prospect.

youth simon-lewis vampire

Cassandra Clare

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There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...

youth

Marcel Proust

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It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone.

loneliness independence youth fear

Charlotte Brontë

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But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

youth charm

Oscar Wilde

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Children are very wise intuitively; they know who loves them most, and who only pretends.

kids youth love intuitive pretending intuition

V.C. Andrews

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But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.' 'What?' 'No I don't.' There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to loose.

youth rip los-angeles

Bret Easton Ellis

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She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.

influence world youth life

Orhan Pamuk

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It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.

racism rage youth i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings maya-angelou

Maya Angelou

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When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep

youth heart belief soul

Maya Angelou

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I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss

youth life wisdom

Maya Angelou

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It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.

youth

Trevanian

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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

youth interaction conversation

Julian Barnes

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I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.

light youth meaning clay signs meaninglessness los-angeles lost

Bret Easton Ellis

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The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

youth life

Evelyn Waugh

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Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

violence youth

Anthony Burgess

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Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

youth wisdom experience

Zora Neale Hurston

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If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean--even if it did build muscle--whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

money opportunity youth women life philosophy conundrums groundhog-day self-contradiction tiresias wishful-thinking parents desire old-age

Christopher Hitchens

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I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth--all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.

rebellion words independence youth contrarianism dissidents harold-rosenberg honorifics hormones oppositionism memoirs free-thought dissent

Christopher Hitchens

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I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.

youth romance optimism soul-mate naivete

Audre Lorde

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In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

youth

Julian Barnes

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"Seven Ages: first puking and mewling Then very pissed-off with your schooling Then fucks, and then fights

youth limerick seven-ages-of-man middle-age william-shakespeare old-age

Robert Conquest

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Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

youth

Milan Kundera

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"Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea."

youth remorse tea nostalgia

T.S. Eliot

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She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.

youth elderly

Daphne du Maurier

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But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.

youth morality understanding-oneself-and-others

T.H. White

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The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

youth morality books life

Haruki Murakami

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Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

youth machines

Anthony Burgess

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I had begun to think my ripening body would wither untasted on the vine.

sex youth eagerness horniness virginity

Jacqueline Carey

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Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

youth wild girls running

Vladimir Nabokov

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What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

youth kim vest los-angeles

Bret Easton Ellis

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We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

youth wisdom

Margaret Atwood

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Whose little boy are you?

racism youth religion god harlem james-baldwin renaissance institution epiphany coming-of-age black church

James Baldwin

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If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

youth humor

Oscar Wilde

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Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

tragedy youth old-age

Julian Barnes

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Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.

world youth life temptations

Oscar Wilde

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She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

youth wisdom

Graham Greene

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And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...

youth

Neil Gaiman

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When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

youth hermann-hesse maturity roots soul

Hermann Hesse

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"A DEAD STATESMAN I could not dig: I dared not rob: Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue And I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among

irony lies war youth politics truth dishonesty deceit

Rudyard Kipling

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God help us for we knew the worst too young.

youth life

Rudyard Kipling

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Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

youth

Oscar Wilde

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The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.

existence youth selling-out maturity existentialism

Paul Murray

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I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.

kids youth growing-up teachers teach teaching nostalgia

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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I'd sit around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work - the boys with silver earrings and big boots - would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed me Thai food or omelets and undress me and make love to me all night with the palm trees whispering windsongs about a tortured gleaming city and the moonlight like flame melting our candle bodies.

youth dreams love

Francesca Lia Block

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"It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people."

youth opinion

Ian McEwan

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When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

youth past memory

Aimee Bender

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What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.

passion youth contributions

Wallace Stegner

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The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

youth

Isaac Asimov

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...what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.

youth jo-s-boys louisa-may-alcott

Louisa May Alcott

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How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

youth grownup tolstoy child childhood

Leo Tolstoy

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If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

youth

Margaret Atwood

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Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

youth colour ageing perspective excitement

Julian Barnes

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The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.

youth young-girls the-blind-assassin margaret-atwood makeup

Margaret Atwood

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Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.

youth humility

James Fenimore Cooper

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Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

youth foolishness

Agatha Christie

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"Sister, why do you do that?" "Do what?" "Cage the animals at night?" "Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them." "But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?" "Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together." --

youth family stuffed-animals foster-care runaway memoirs nun neglect

Jennings Michael Burch

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She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

time loss youth

Annie Dillard

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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

youth humor life

Julian Barnes

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The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.

youth despondency social-problems drugs

Spider Robinson

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I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?

youth life plans

Thomas Hardy

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What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugene de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

youth psychology

Honoré de Balzac

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"We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.

youth hope love truth torment honor lost

Rudyard Kipling

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Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces. At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. Was the last face the real one? No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)

youth identity man-of-many-faces czech masks self novel

Milan Kundera

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Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk to me about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead!

kids youth death life glare glares glaring money-monetary plead buy pleading baby kid cry talk crying talking child children young dead eyes young-adults

V.C. Andrews

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It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

pain youth

Geraldine Brooks

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In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

present suicide young-adult youth future imagination beath decision teenager burden childhood dying

Rebecca Solnit

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From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell him what to do... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you any,ore; it's his peers.

youth teenagers-and-parents peer-pressure parenting children

Barbara Coloroso

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Nature felt no change, and was ever young.

youth helstone maragaret

Elizabeth Gaskell

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It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.

youth boyhood face tolstoy smile childhood

Leo Tolstoy

e9a32a9

I am life,' the girl said. 'What?' he said, startled. 'To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I'm life and when you're done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don't feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.' Nick said, 'I'm thirty-four and I don't feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.' 'It will,' she said.

youth

Philip K. Dick

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Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter

youth

Hermann Hesse

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Young people think they never can change, but they do in the most wonderful manner, and very few die of broken hearts.

youth louisa-may-alcott

Louisa May Alcott

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People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.

youth

Louis L'Amour

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The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.

youth love wisdom

Dodie Smith

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You are young, and rich, and have friends, and at such an age I know it is hard to die!

wealth youth

James Fenimore Cooper

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When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.

youth love

Nicole Krauss

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Sometimes, Tiffany thought, I am so with being young.

youth tiffany-aching

Terry Pratchett

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Buttercup dried her tears and began to smile. She took a deep breath, heaved a sigh. It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning.

passion youth growing-pains experience

William Goldman

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Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

tragedy time youth beauty death shabby wrinkled grow mean old young die

Raymond Chandler

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They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

youth growing-up

George Eliot

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Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks - open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality - and the gift - that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.

youth leadership vigor zeal

Warren G. Bennis

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We _are_ rich,' said Anne staunchly. 'Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we are as happy as queens and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls - all silver and shallow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

wealth youth l-m-montgomery

L.M. Montgomery

b7a7090

Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?

youth childhood

Leo Tolstoy

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"The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ("The Pool")"

youth excitement-of-youth excitement night

Daphne du Maurier

d5e05fa

The thing about the old is that we never change so much as the young. We slip in degrees, adding rings like trees--a new wrinkle here, a shade less color there, but the young transform like caterpillars into butterflies. They become whole new people as if overnight.

youth change

Michael J.  Sullivan

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Me--a teenager? If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me, would I need to treat her as near and dear, although she's strange to me, and distant? Shed a tear, kiss her brow for the simple reason that we share a birthdate? So many dissimilarities between us that only the bones are likely still the same, the cranial vault, the eye sockets. Since her eyes seem a little larger, her eyelashes are longer, she's taller, and the whole body is tightly sheathed in smooth, unblemished skin. Relatives and friends still link us, it is true, but in her world nearly all are living, while in mine almost no one survives from that shared circle. We differ so profoundly, talk and think about completely different things. She knows next to nothing-- but with a doggedness deserving better causes. I know much more-- but not for sure. She shows me poems, written in a clear and careful script I haven't used for years. I read the poems, read them. Well, maybe that one if it were shorter and touched up in a couple of places. The rest do not bode well. The conversation stumbles. On her pathetic watch time is still cheap and unsteady. On mine it's far more precious and precise. Nothing in parting, a fixed smile and no emotion. Only when she vanishes, leaving her scarf in her haste. A scarf of genuine wool, in colored stripes crocheted for her by our mother. I've still got it.

youth poetry change growth self

Wisława Szymborska

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Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.

time youth

Stefan Zweig

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You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you.

youth

V.C. Andrews

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And I'll look back at him because I shan't be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I've ever loved, and every time I've been happy.

youth music love nostalgia

Jean Rhys

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Mrs. Hammon told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I haven't card for him since.

youth

L. M. Montgomery

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...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.

youth technology

Lynne Truss

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...growing pale and sober with the thought that her fate was soon to be decided; for, like all young people, she was sure that her whole life could be settled by one human creature, quite forgetting how wonderfully Providence trains us by disappointment, surprises us with unexpected success, and turns our seeming trials into blessing.

youth louisa-may-alcott

Louisa May Alcott

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I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat.

youth work

Hanif Kureishi

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To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth

youth

Victor Hugo

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I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.

youth human-nature

Michael Chabon

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Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.

youth sorrow wisdom

Hermann Hesse

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But things are so bad, I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't do something.

feelings youth problems emotions sad

Margaret Peterson Haddix

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Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.u

youth growing-up leaving left-behind growth

Neil Gaiman

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Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man's way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?

youth lust

Trevanian

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Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.

unhappiness grief youth sorrow death tolstoy self-love funeral childhood

Leo Tolstoy

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In my early teens, I heard about and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was , but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative.

literature youth william-s-burroughs homosexuality coming-of-age queer erotica

Peter Dubé