Youth Quotes

Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.

~ Tim Kreider

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

~ John Knowles

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

~ Charles Finch

After that, I’d wanted to date, but I simply didn’t know how. It seemed to come natural to everyone else, pairing up and going out. And now, well, I felt like a nonparticipant, like there was a schedule to be followed and I was so far behind I’d never get caught up.

~ Lesa Howard

I'm thirty-four.You don't look thirty-four.That's because I'm not married. Mae's smile felt as if it were set in concrete. Marriage tends to age a woman.

~ Jennifer Crusie

If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.

~ Charles Finch

We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious–but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys–if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.

~ Hermann Hesse

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Be game--take a chance--don't hide behind veils and veils of discretion... Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them. You are new evidence, fresh and young. Your work, the spirit of youth, you are the progress of human evolution. If age dulls you it will be time enough then to be ponderous and heavy--or quit. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing--not to settle and accept.

~ Robert Henri

The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

'Youth is the time for loving, so poets always say.

~ Angus Wilson

Aging offers certain rewards that youth cannot. It represents the culmination of our efforts in building self-knowledge, families, friendships, careers, and the sense of self that comes from facing whatever adversity we may have encountered. Aging is to be honored. Youth certainly has its own set of rewards, but to dwell on them to the exclusion of those that come later in life causes a stagnation of the self. It keeps us from experiencing an appreciation of living an entire (ital) life, not just the beginning. When we're really old we will likely measure our lives by how well we loved, how well we were loved, and by what we created, whether that be family, work, art, or friendships. Even if we have chosen to have them, we will probably not measure our lives collagen injection by collagen injection.

~ Joyce T. Mcfadden

The city had seemed grand to him once ... it had once had a certain clarity. When you're young you think it's the clarity that's intoxicating, later you realize you were only ever drunk on your own vision.

~ Jennifer Dubois

See him now, so boyish a body and an older head.” (Bhutta)

~ M.k. Bhutta

The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

~ Cephalus

For a girl there is a shorter version of youth.

~ Aporva Kala

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.

~ Shannon Celebi

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

~ Hermann Hesse

To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221

~ Hugh Howey

As we got closer to Montauk, she seemed to grow younger, years of worry and work disappearing from her face. Her eyes turned the color of the sea.

~ Rick Riordan

She had the wild look of someone who hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine.

~ Emma Straub

The phrase after-life was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

~ Siegfried Sassoon

Serving my generation with excellence will mean my generation can in turn lead with excellence.

~ Onyi Anyado

I was there laughing and joking with everyone else, but it’s like there was some part of mestanding back, watching, thinking, “Is this as good as it gets?

~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

Don’t worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.

~ Shannon Celebi

In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important--if you grow old and lose that without finding another way to be important, you will slip away, fall into insignificance, like one sheet of paper. You may be useful, but you will never stand out from the crowd. You cannot look at a piece of paper and say, I remember you. You never can.

~ Katherine Ewell

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought it was the only way to behave; then he suddenly discovers that, even for a prince, there are such things as music, literature, not to speak of standing for the post of deputy.

~ Marcel Proust

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

~ Hilary Mantel

One boy's a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at all', ran the old country saying.

~ Flora Thompson

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and her infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. The game unifies, joining father and son pitching baseballs at night after a long day at the office, pitches pounding the mitt or skipping past, one time even knocking the coffee cup handle clean off and the boy scampering off to retrieve a wild one as the dad sips and ponders. The game allows brothers to bond even when the age gap is too great for real competition, their mutual effort to fashion a bridge between disparate age and ability forming a bond of trust and respect. And finally, it is the game’s presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me and after all the batting practice he threw and grounders he hit, his shoulder aches and his knees need replacement. Even though youth masks it so you don't realize it all when you’re a kid, someday it happens to you and suddenly you realize you are him and you are left wishing you could go back and tell him what you now know and perhaps thank him for what he gave up. You imagine him back then receiving nothing in return except the knowledge that you would someday understand but he could not hasten that day or that revelation and he abided it all so graciously knowing that your realization might be too late for him. So you console yourself that in the absence of your gratitude he clung to hope and conviction and the future. Turn the page and you find yourself staring out at the new generation and you wince as his pitches bruise your palm and crack your thumb and realize that today the game is growth and achievement and tomorrow it will be love and memories. The game is a gift.

~ Drew Rogers

The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.

~ Helen Mirren

One of the greatest challenge facing young people today, is thelarge scale availability of half truth’s and manipulated facts

~ Oche Otorkpa

It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.

~ Roman Payne

Young people today seem to be coming around to the idea it really doesn’t matter which politician or political party you vote for; and they’re catching on that it doesn’t even matter if you don’t vote because they have realized modern elections are just a way for the 1% to appease the 99% – a way to keep the masses in line by making them believe they’ve had their say, thereby perpetuating the lie that democracy continues.

~ James Morcan

Youth is no protection; in the end, life scars us all.

~ C.w. Gortner

If young people are our greatest asset in a war that must be won then wemust be willing to extricate them at whatever cost from the clutchesof those who seek to exploit their weaknesses

~ Oche Otorkpa

Politicians would be well advised not to hold their breath for youth to engage in politics any time soon. Today’s youth are the first generation to have realized for real change to occur, it must happen on an individual level rather than at an administrative level.

~ James Morcan

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.

~ Rose Macaulay

That's how life works. You know it when you know it.They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here.They're on a sixteen-line highway.Driving west.

~ James Frey