Youth Quotes - Youth is an unpleasant period
“I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before
many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape
becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western
windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the
white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like
mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime
trees.
The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and
my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window
and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
“Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid
I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that
require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in
order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and
unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards
them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I
honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are
heavily influenced by this.”
― Criss Jami, Healology
“The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which
youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then
forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare
at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”
― Huey Newton
“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick
up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a
little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and
used-up and proud and silly.”
― John Fowles, The Collector
“No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than
becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.”
― Knut Hamsun
“But at a certain point we turn round, almost
instinctively,
and see that a gate has been bolted behind us, barring
our way back (...)
Then we understand that time is passing and that one
day or another the road must come to an end.”
― Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
“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, Less Than Zero
“Like you and me," said Jade. "How we used to
be."
"What do you mean? Crazy?"
"Living on our own world. Believing what we felt
was separate from everything else. We couldn't do anything except be together
and nothing else was real."
"That's right."
"Well, that's crazy. And you just said it was,
even you."
"No, " I said, "not when we both believe
it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that's
not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It's not when you make
it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it
about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.”
― Scott Spencer, Endless Love
“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")”
― Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected
Stories
“O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and
friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with
the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
“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.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow
“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.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
“Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not
possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for
Free Spirits
“He would get up and go out into a world which seemed
very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood
to which an old man returns.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
“We youths say “like” all the time because we mistrust
reality.”
― James S. Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a
College Revolutionary
“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct
out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself,
and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time,
which a man can properly call his own - that which he has all to himself; the
rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time,
not his.”
― Charles Lamb, The Superannuated Man
