c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks
— P.K. Page, Hologram LP: A Book of Glosas
There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.
— Mary Renault
Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.
— John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich
He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.("The Poison Garden")
— Valery Bryusov, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
The Old Woman asked, "Here you are, dear Youth, you are looking at the Garden and do not know that it is an evil Garden. Here you are waiting for the Beautiful Woman and do not know that her beauty is destructive. You have been living in my room for two years and never before have you become so engrossed as you have today. Apparently your turn has come too. Go away from the window before it is too late, do not breathe the evil fragrance of these deceitful flowers and do not wait for the Beautiful Woman to appear below your window and enchant you. She will come, she will enchant you, and you will follow her against your will.Speaking thus, the Old Woman lit two candles on the table where some books were lying, banged the window shut and drew the curtain tightly across the window. The curtain rings scraped lightly along the bronze curtain rod, and the yellow linen of the curtain fluttered and once again lay motionless — and the room became cheerful, comfortable and peaceful. And it seemed that there was no longer any garden beyond the window, nor was there any sorcery in the world, and everything was simple, ordinary, and would remain so once and for all.("The Poison Garden")
— Valery Bryusov, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.
— Erica Lorraine Scheidt
You walk and walk and walk and then you look at back and see your youth, so far away from you, so young, so curious, so hopeful, so breezy, so brave! To feel young in old age, remember your youth very often! Remind yourself frequently what you were once!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Young men think old men fools, old men know young men to be so.
— Pravinee Hurbungs
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...
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
The rebel inside of me always ignored the rules.
— Shannon A. Thompson, Death Before Daylight
No one's serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades
— Arthur Rimbaud
You are special person. Seek to develop your talents.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
— Ali Smith
They say that as one grows older one mellows, become more tolerant. Perhaps. Sometimes I think it is more a stripping off, a peeling away of irrelevancies. But somehwere in youth, as childhood is left behind, certain truths about ourselves become apparent, and once we recognise them, we must abide by them.
— Molly Izzard
The only thing scarier than death is the disappearance from youth.
— Marc Spitz
First, stop making formula films that people have already started rejecting.This year, several big budget films haven't been entertained by the audience.Still stars continue to dictate terms.The youth wants new good content.From htcafeSaturday,Dec.20,2014
— Anurag Kashyap
Beauty and youth. What a dazzling combination. To bewilder and to sparkle. Days filled with sunshine. And men worshiping at her feet. Love was a game she played with wantonness and mischief.-Fabulous
— Jofelyn Martinez Khapra
But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.
— Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
— Naomi Klein
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.
— Salman Rushdie
Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.
— John  Williams, Stoner
Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.
— Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
Is there a word for when you are young and pretending to have lived and loved a thousand lives? Is there a German word for that? Let's say its schaufenfrieglasploit.
— Amy Poehler
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of heresy.
— Augustine of Hippo
We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.
— Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin
Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child’s growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who “can’t stop now” to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is“too silly for anything,” should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that “bump of inquiry” was put on top of our skulls.
— Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby
Youth, if adults will only admit that it has any brains at all, will stand out, today, in a most promising light. Philosophically, Youth is Wisdom in formation, and with many thoughts startling to adult minds; and, industrially, this vast World’s coming stability is now, today, in its bands; growing slowly, as a blossom grows from its bud. If you will furnish him with a thorough schooling, you can plank down your dollar that Youth, starting out from this miraculous day, will not lag nor shirk on that coming day in which old joints, rusty and crackling, must slow down; and, calling for an oil can, you will find that Youth only, is that lubrication which can run Tomorrow’s World.
— Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby
When the society missteps, the youths are the first to fall sideways.
— Nyona Matende
Young people must appreciate the beauty of old age. The old people were once young.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range--and with a coup to plan for at the end.
— lois bujord
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
But flaming youth in all it's madnessKeeps nothing of its heart concealed:It's loves and hates, its joys and sadness,Are babbled out and soon revealed.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys sleeping on benches and under bridges, and luckier unlucky boys sleeping in shelters, which feel like safety but not like home. There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain. There are boys who clutch secrets at night in the same way they clutch denial in the day. There are boys who do not think of themselves at all when they dream. There are boys who will be woken in the night. There are boys who fall asleep with phones to their ears.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there’s anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying ”here’s to the youth”, pointing at me. And I might just be youngand naivefor I still believe in the freedom of choiceof how to spend your life.So they toast to the youth, who still think she’s free, and that’s all fine by me.
— Charlotte Eriksson
I suppose you’re young,’ she conceded, managing once again to make youth sound like impetigo
— Tyne O'Connell, Latest Accessory
To love all ages yield surrender
— But to the young it's raptures bringA blessing bountiful and tender-As storms refresh the fields of spring.
In the morning After taking cold shower —-what a mistake—- I look at the mirror.There, a funny guy, Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin, —-what a pity—- Poor, dirty, old man, He is not me, absolutely not.Land and life Fishing in the ocean Sleeping in the desert with stars Building a shelter in the mountains Farming the ancient way Singing with coyotes Singing against nuclear war— I’ll never be tired of life. Now I’m seventeen years old, Very charming young man.I sit quietly in lotus position, Meditating, meditating for nothing. Suddenly a voice comes to me: “To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror.
— Nanao Sakaki, Break the Mirror
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.
— Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8
It's sad that several political parties still count the dead, the starving, the unemployed by their religion, caste, creed and sect. The young generation needs to engage in politics of right vs wrong and not right vs left.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte, so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but the years in Rome have been too much for him. I do not wonder at the change; yet”--her voice fell--“he might have dealt tenderly at least with you. It is a hard, cruel nature which in youth can forget its first loves.
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Treasure the beauty of youthful life and the wisdom of adulthood.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Merle had the feeling that he almost kissed her, but then his lips only touched her hair briefly, and all she could think of was that she hadn't washed it for days. It was crazy, really. Here they were, all trapped in this accursed sphinx stronghold, and she was thinking about washing her hair! Was that what being in love did to you? And then, was it being in love that was responsible for the lump in her throat and the fluttering in her stomach?
— Kai Meyer, The Glass Word
We are paint streaked runners,deafened by the cries of all the sad people. It's a powerful sound that practically yanks the tears right out of you. Sometimes, you just can't help but feel like a very smallclam ina verybig ocean.
— Taylor Rhodes, Sixteenth Notes: The Breaking of the Rose-Colored Glasses
For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one's youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are - in the secret heart where they take place - themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy.
— C.P. Snow, Time of Hope
[Self] Perception is directly proportional to performance. Change a youth's perception, and you change their performance, their future... and their life.
— Justin Young
When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.
— Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.
— Lily King, Euphoria
It was another country. It was a country for the young, a country where you died before you got old.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
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, We Learn Nothing
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, A Separate Peace
Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.
— Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
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, Phantom's Dance
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, What the Lady Wants
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, The Last Enchantments
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, The Glass Bead Game
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, Tender Is the Night
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 Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
'Youth is the time for loving, so poets always say.
— Angus Wilson, No Laughing Matter
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, Your Daughter's Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women
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.
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, Life... Love... Kumbh...
All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.
— Shannon Celebi, Small Town Demons
Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221
— Hugh Howey, Wool
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, The Lightning Thief
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 Vacationers
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, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
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 You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey
Don’t worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.
— Shannon Celebi, Small Town Demons
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, Dear Killer
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 Guermantes Way
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, Lark Rise to Candleford
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, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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, Before the Spotlight
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, The Unseen Terrorist
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, The Wanderess
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, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
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, The Unseen Terrorist
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, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
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, Dangerous Ages
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, Bright Shiny Morning
As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was time for buds to blossom, what did that matter?
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Young things like you don't need any ornaments but those you wear to-night: youth, health, intelligence, and modesty.
— Louisa May Alcott
Knowledge in youth is wisdom in age.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour
...for they was never a young man yet who don't want to go out and right a wrong, or kill a man, or have to do something to earn his right to what is there for the taking, all along. Only he don't think he can ask, nor take, without earning it. Without no pain. Oftener than not, a young man's a regular fool.
— Lee Smith, Oral History
Friday dusk becomes Friday evening. The park is feverish with life. A young Asian man screams into his mobile phone, not stopping to listen: a young man with his heart in his penis.
— Craig  Stone, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness
No man can protect you like your father, No women can love you like your mother.
— Pradeepa Pandiyan
I cherished her individuality, that spark of independence no child should lose to life's restrictions and parameters.
— Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls
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.
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
It was as if each of them sensed vaguely that the Saturday afternoons of youth are few, and precious, and this feeling which neither of them could have defined or described made every moment of this time together too short, too quickly gone, yet clearer and more sharply edged than any other.
— Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
When your youth is about to enter in old age it shouldn't wonder, what happened? it must say, well done.
— Amit Kalantri
You get to be about eleven or twelve and everything's old hat. They've drummed the miraculous out of you, but you don't want it to be like that. You want the miraculous. You want everything to still be new.
— Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now
They were Archer's second set of children an d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.
— Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.
— T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn
Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere... - Pg. 82
— Robert   Harris, Pompeii
Oh how can we, scarce mastering our passions, expect that youth should keep itself in check?
— Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
— Henry David Thoreau
What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?
— J.M. Coetzee, Youth
I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young
— P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
In terms of days and moments lived, you'll never again be as young as you are right now, so spend this day, the youth of your future, in a way thatdeflects regret. Invest in yourself. Have some fun. Do something important.Love somebody extra.
— Victoria Moran
Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.
— George Chapman, All Fools
With age brings wisdom
—  with youth brings innovation. Combine the two and they are unstoppable.
CLEOPATRA: My salad days,When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,To say as I said then! But, come, away;Get me ink and paper:He shall have every day a several greeting,Or I'll unpeople Egypt.
— William Shakespeare
Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.
— Bill  Vaughn
Youth must triumph... now. Afterwards, it will be life.
— Jose Garcia Villa, Anchored Angel, The
Passion + Purpose = Prosperity.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
With every breath, I breathe in so much of inspiration. I feel if there is one thing as free and as important as oxygen, it's inspiration.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
That's what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
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.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
A friend once told Megan that we are always seventeen years old, waiting for our lives to begin. More than ever, clutching to this man, Megan understood that.
— Harlan Coben, Stay Close
...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
There's a reason why I've spent one-third of my life doing this. My dream is to meet and connect 3 billion young people of the world to information and opportunities in my lifetime.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others.
— Susan Choi, My Education
More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.
— Robert Frost
Sometimes it's only the young ones who are crazy enough to change the world.
— Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea
Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Marina
...love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow...
— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays
Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
Maybe it is because I am an old man, but I find, M. Poirot, that there is something about the defenselessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless - so sure. So generous and so demanding.
— Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.
— Joseph Conrad, Youth
You were trying to impress her with a story about getting mauled by a thresher?”“It made sense at the time.”“Ah, youth.” He sighed. “Do you know what I would give to be young again?”“No, what?”“Nothing. In fact, you’d have to pay me.
— Jon Skovron, Man Made Boy
Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn't leave, so I finally had to pretend to get sick to my stomach just to get her out of the room long enough for him to climb out the window and down the tree. He fell, broke his leg. Ah, to be young again.
— Amy Sherman-Palladino
He felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?
— Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.
— Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?
— Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder
My heart swells with emotion each time I recall the sweetness of my youth!
— Peggy Toney Horton, Somewhere in Heaven My Mother Is Smiling
I kept trying to tell people that just because I was young didn't mean I could speak for all young people.
— Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.
— Jimmy Breslin
The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.
— Anna Quindlen, Blessings
Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets.
— Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
I want to be Tragedy, I want to be Juliet, I want to be Romeo. Thus with a kiss I die.
— Lee Smith, On Agate Hill
I feel ugly” I said and you looked at me as if I spoke a different language. There are things you will never understand and if there were words to describe the rapture that takes place in my head from time to time I would put my hand in front of your eyes to protect you from all the ugliness in the world. I kept my eyes on the streetlights outside the window and you kissed every inch of my body as if you could kiss the pain away.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
— Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
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.God help us, for we knew the worst too young!from "Gentleman Rankers
— Rudyard Kipling
Well, sir, it is precisely my notion that one sees and learns most of all by observing our younger generations.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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
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.
— Michael J. Sullivan, The Crown Tower
Nature felt no change, and was ever young.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
If you miss your bus, just start walking.
— Shan McGinley
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.
— Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
You think all teenagers care about are musicians and movie stars?Spend some time in Wisconsin.We'll blow your socks off.
— Joan Bauer, Hope Was Here
Only youth has a taste of immortality.
— D.H. Lawrence
All this security and prospects are different for different people. Somebody is happy playing music and with a less pay, somebody is secure in the corporate world with a high pay with headache. We have individual tastes, tastes are not universal.
— Ravindra Shukla, A Maverick Heart: Between Love and Life
But he had been the victim of the world’s most common crime—his youth had been kidnapped by a thing called time. It had likely also been raped, dismembered, and buried somewhere never to be seen again
— Aurelio Voltaire, Call of the Jersey Devil
Who was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?
— Agatha Christie, Nemesis
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't.
— D.H. Lawrence
As a very young person, I was ready and willing to explore and try new things, unhampered by the daily routines that adults so often feel obligated to adhere to.
— K. Martin Beckner, Chips of Red Paint
We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain
I was tired of her getting away with being so young.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
The Fanatics have dirtied its fiber, and their mottos have reated a thick layer of mold over its wounds, one of total intolerance, feeding on the indoctrination of the youth cliques.
— Rami Ollaik
Am committed to creating a Peaceful, Sustainable and healthy world.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
When you've made up your mind, no use lagging behind, go ahead and no relenting,Let your youth have free reign, it won't come again, so be bold and no repenting.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
I walked out and breathed fresh air. I felt the sun on my skin. The world is a different place when you are well, when you are young. The world is beautiful and safe. I said hello to the gatekeeper. He said hello back to me.
— Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit
...because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.
— Meg Wolitzer
If you aren't living on the edge you're taking up too much room. Anon.
— Pamela Eglinski
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up.
— Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre