Youth Quotes

Few, if any, survive their teens.

~ Maya Angelou

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

~ Jean Rhys

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

~ John Cage

Youth is an unpleasant period, for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

~ Julian Barnes

Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps' rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.

~ Robert Conquest

We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.

~ Haruki Murakami

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.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long, it would last forever. But it's just a blink.

~ Chris Pavone

My mom said I was a handful. Now I'm helpful.

~ Jamie Lee Curtis

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

~ Hermann Hesse

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

~ Maya Angelou

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

~ David Foster Wallace

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

~ Anthony Burgess

All things old become new again. In my youth the athletes had crew cuts and the hippies had long hair. Now the athletes have long hair and the hippies are bald.

~ Harley King

Youth is feeling seventy years old, misanthropic, and ready to die at fifteen

~ Nikolai Grozni

No man knows he is young while he is young.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I had only four hairs worth shaving, but I managed to inflict five cuts attempting to remove them.

~ Troy Soos

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

~ Louis L'amour

With age, gone are the forevers of youth. Gone is the willingness to procrastinate, delay, to play the waiting game. Now each day is a treasure beyond compare . . . because there are so few such diadems left.

~ Joe L. Wheeler

...and it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes, those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by an ogreish professional hostess. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as it's end product.

~ John Steinbeck

But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Youth is a disease from which we all recover.

~ Dorothy Fuldheim

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

~ Oscar Wilde

Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.

~ John Galsworthy

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

~ Grace Paley

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Encourage kids to enjoy running and play in athletics. Don't force them to run too much competition.

~ Arthur Lydiard

But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday—those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies!

~ Roger Zelazny

I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.

~ Margaret Atwood

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?

~ Trevanian

We were young. Everyone was young in those days. That’s the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were only young people when you were young.

~ Lloyd Jones

…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.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us. (A Woman's Vengeance)

~ Jules Barbey D'aurevilly

She wanted to be her, or be with her, or destroy her.

~ Rachel B. Glaser

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not.

~ Paulette Jiles

I leave such ventures ti you younger men with the fever of life still in your blood.

~ Kate Chopin

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

~ China Miéville

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

~ John Fowles