c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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.
— Trevanian, Shibumi
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two
Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for
— W.S. Merwin
I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.
— Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge
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.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worth part of being young. So many of your decisions aren't yours
—  they're made by other people. Sometimes they're made badly by other people. Sometimes they're made by other people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. The bastards.
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.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age- which can only arise from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long life- and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately, because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing.
— Aristotle
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
— Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
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 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.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
They envy your youth. You two are like exotic creatures from the land of the young.’I’ve never understood all that these-are-the-best-years-of-your-life crap. If this is as good as it gets then I might as well quit now. Let me get to the shimmery oasis of adulthood.
— Leanne Hall, This is Shyness
If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young...
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.
— Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk
O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring – as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, 'I alone am alive – behold!' even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun .. like snow .. and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to do whatever you may will, but in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do: it is this that you scatter to the winds – gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts – that he has a right to cry, 'Oh, what could I not have done, if only I had not wasted my time.
— Ivan Turgenev, First Love
The madness of youth made me unafraid.
— Lauren DeStefano, Perfect Ruin
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. 
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Spontaneity is the province of youth
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
Young people think they never can change, but they do in the most wonderful manner, and very few die of broken hearts.
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
Zizi was young and often confused about how to live his life, and when he made a choice he clung to it with fierce resolve, as if to beat his uncertainty into submission.
— Candace Bushnell, Trading Up
CANDLE WISDOM If you knewwhat you will knowwhen your candlehas burnt low,it would greatlyease your plightwhile your candlestill burns bright.
— Piet Hein
As Buckingham talked, I couldn't help but remember that there's a reason they call us Gallagher Girls. It's not just because the youngest of us are twelve. It's also because our founder was under twenty. From the very beginning we have been discounted and discredited, underestimated and undervalued. And, for the most part, we wouldn't have it any other way.
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
The only thing a person of my age can do is fall in love secretly, silently, likeI had done with Mariana. Fall in love knowing that all is lost and there is no hope.
— José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert  Other Stories
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth...
— Sinclair Lewis
Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Few, if any, survive their teens.
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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, M: Writings '67-'72
Youth lasts much longer than young people think.
— Marie Joséphine de Suin
Youth is an unpleasant period
—  for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.
Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it.
— Charlotte Brontë
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
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, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.
— Margaret Mead
I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.
— Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
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
The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.
— Catherynne M. Valente
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.
My mom said I was a handful. Now I'm helpful.
— Jamie Lee Curtis, When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old's Memoir of Her Youth
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, Gertrude
One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
— Gene Brown
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, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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, Infinite Jest
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
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, Wunderkind
No man knows he is young while he is young.
— G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography
I had only four hairs worth shaving, but I managed to inflict five cuts attempting to remove them.
— Troy Soos, Murder at Fenway Park
People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.
— Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
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, Report to Greco
When you're that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me-- that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.
— Alan Bradley
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, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.
— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.
— Grace Paley, Later the Same Day
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
— Cyril Connolly
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, Lord of Light
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, The Tent
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, The Summer of Katya
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, Mister Pip
…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, Jo's Boys
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, Les Diaboliques
She wanted to be her, or be with her, or destroy her.
— Rachel B. Glaser, Paulina & Fran
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, Enemy Women
I leave such ventures ti you younger men with the fever of life still in your blood.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
— China Miéville, Embassytown
And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
— John Fowles, The Magus
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
[Y]ou're young. Young takes care of everything.
— Neil Simon, Proposals
Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world—that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, —which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,—that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
— Aldous Huxley, The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin.
— Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet
See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.
— J.P. Donleavy, The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms: The Chronicle Of One Of The Strangest Stories Ever To Be Rumoured About Around New York
When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
— Émile Zola, Pot Luck
Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.'The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.'Ay,' she broke in; 'and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.' She swayed her head slowly from side to side. 'A many things to see and sorrow for.' ("The Red Room")
— H.G. Wells
Long story short, you will at least get that one unreasonable impulse to prove to yourself that that the invincibility and imperviousness that you feel during youth. It’s something tangible, something that can yield results like in chemistry lab or through gains in stocks. You want to get high from being at the cusp of adolescence; like the sweet smell of hookah that you know your neighbor smokes and you don’t know why it’s appealing.You know what I’m talking about.
— Mara Joaquin, Lost in the Sky
One of the most important jobs of the youth is to make the elderly happy.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table
But there was little heart to our lust,only the confusion of not knowinghow long we'd have in our bodies.
— Joseph Bathanti, This Metal
...one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth.
— Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro
I miss those childish days of long ago, when one day was as long as twenty are now ...
— C.J. Heck
He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the "St. Regis' Tattler"; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old
— Jeremy Aldana
Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.
— Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides
The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he *had* allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the 'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over *all* for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. ("The Jolly Corner")
— Henry James, Complete Stories, 1892-1898
Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail,the weight of the detailthe rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth.
— Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs
I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.
— Ruadhán J. McElroy
When you're young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution - such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight - to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood - no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet.
— Charlotte Brontë
…but youth yearned to youth.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.
— Evelyn Waugh
They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.
— Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire
The gods granted us misery, in jealousy over the thought that we two, always together, should enjoy our youth, and then come to the threshold of old age.
— Homer, The Odyssey
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?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
I can tell you something remarkable about that time, although it has only just occurred to me now. I never thought about death, like I do now. I never worried about dying. I only ever thought about being alive.
— Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up
Youth is as easily wasted as a fine wine consumed by a drunken man. There is no poetry in aging, and Javert lived out the process in its most hideous iteration.
— Kelsey Brickl, Wolves and Urchins: The Early Life of Inspector Javert
Connor is my friend... I've hacked. Which one came first?
— Me, I
Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevesky wrote on gambling? It's like that. When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
...summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longing we sometimes felt each other feel. With him life was routine; without him life was unbearable.
— Harper Lee, "To Kill A Mockingbird" A4 Gcse
Remember when we were children and life was simple
—  how I yearn to return to those days.
I think . . . I've got everything I want.
— Jackson Lanzing, Joyride Vol. 2
Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It’s bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who’s making all the racket. I’m surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there’s a sticker: NO FEAR. I think, good girl.
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
I'm sick of that, I said. Young, young, young, that's what I get, all day, everyday. But I know your secret....You're all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you've taken as you've grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don't have to compromise yet. I don't have to do a single thing I don't want to do. That's why you hate me.
— Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter
She couldn't see the homemade colored sprinkles, the tender yellow cake, or the pale pink frosting made with strawberry syrup enhanced with a little rosewater. Although our local strawberries weren't in season yet, I had conjured the aroma and taste of juicy berries warmed by the sun. I hoped this flavor would help the two old people return once more to their youth and the carefree feeling of a summer day.
— Judith Fertig, The Cake Therapist
Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But 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 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.
— Anthony Burgess
We recognised that the youth demographic needed to be pursued, preferably with dogs.
— Marcus Berkmann, Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek
As we grow older we are apt to forget that the despair of the young is even more gigantic and immediately overwhelming than their hopefulness: we never again face such towering blank walls of misery.
— J B Priestly
Jess is painfully aware of how young she is. Her shirtsleeves don't quite extend to her wrists; after a growth spurt last summer, her debate clothes don't fit as well as she thought. She feels as if she's playing dress-up.
— C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick
But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.
— Emma Cline
[H]e was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time.
— Hal Clement, Star Light
It is an interesting concept, is it not- the idea of never aging? Would it appeal to you, to be rich, beautiful, and eternally young?""I think everyone has a desire for perennial youth," I admitted, "but in the end, this is a Faustian, cautionary tale, about vanity and frivolity, and the dangers of trying to interfere with the basic laws of life and death. When I really think about it, I would not wish to be young for ever.""No? And why not?""Because I would be obliged to watch everyone I loved grow old and die.""What if that were not the case? What if there was one person whom you loved deeply, with whom you could live on for ever, under the same terms?"I hesitated, then said: "Perhaps then it would prove agreeable, as long it did not involve selling my soul to the Devil.
— Syrie James, Dracula, My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker
I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Perhaps that cruel girl was right? I should be a good girl, and my friend will be fine. I am too dramatic, always seeing the end in a flower blossom, the destruction in a raindrop. I must accept the things I cannot change.
— Bibiana Krall, Moon Zinc
The greatest thing about youth is that you're not yet battle-weary, so you'll try anything.
— Bryan Cranston, A Life in Parts
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Some call it growing up. I call it life, and in my experience, it doesn't necessarily get easier over the years. But the eternal struggle is beautiful, and I'm happy to persevere.
— Connor Franta, A Work in Progress
[Alyosha] was to some extent a youth of our last epoch — that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Cynicism is a boring and dull old man’s disease people have no business getting when they’re young.
— Erika Lopez, Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing
From castles of bone unknown music comes But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations,––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect thedancing and the voices which are only now esteemed. The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
We cling to the most painful reminders of our youth, our memories or our injuries, perhaps so we can look back to our former selves, console them, and say: Keep going. I know how the story ends.
— Sarah Domet, The Guineveres
Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table at a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn't stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at the table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it.
— Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped
I think I've lived quite the unorthodox life so far, but you probably feels that way about yourself too. So much goes untold in our lives.
— Connor Franta, A Work in Progress
Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.
— Andrea Cremer, The Turncoat's Gambit
Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why?Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this youthful desolation walking up the driveway was exactly proof of that. But then Amy straightened up, glancing toward the house with a wary squint, and she seemed transformed to Isabelle, suddenly a presence to be reckoned with. Her limbs were long and even, her breasts beneath her T-shirt seemed round and right, neither large or small, only part of some pleasing symmetry; her face looked intelligent and shrewd. Isabelle, sitting motionless in her chair, felt intimidated.And angry. The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter's body that angered her. It was not the girl's unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for taken up all the space in her life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man, while she herself had not.
— Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle
It is marvelous to be young on a big city street.
— Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
There was no fear of sandpaper earth, no sense of danger from a bare-skinned spill, for the boy was a child—a six-foot, one-inch growing child who knew nothing of accident, injury, dismemberment, death—who would study those lessons tomorrow, thank you, but not today. Today, it would be sufficient to be wild and free.
— Tony   Taylor, Counters
They call it "young music"; I see, however, that the record industry makes millions by the carload for shrewd older people! They invoke the name of spontaneity, nonconformity and originality; actually, canny "clothing industrialists" manipulate the field, undisturbed sovereigns! They call themselves revolutionaries, but the overscrupulous attentions devoted to their hair and their dress risk creating merely effeminates.
— Pope John Paul I, Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I
She was a natural in being careless, haggard, even dirty. that made her look adventurous, flirtatious and even promiscuous. though deep inside her pure virginity was intact and unknowingly she ended glowing under tender virginity that she possessed.
— Apurva sharma
Hostel is one phase in a man's life that teaches him what Indian mothers fail to teach their children despite the use of potential weapons like rolling pin,broom stick, wiper so on and henceforth. Who knows if you are luckier, you might just experience your bachelorhood as a paying guest.
— Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade
What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.
— Germany Kent
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
I don’t think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It’s because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.
— Joseph Conrad
They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Love is for every age auspicious,But for the virginal and youngIts impulses are more propitiousLike vernal storms on meadows sprung:They freshen in the rain of passion,Ripening in their renovation –And life, empowered, sends up shootsOf richest blooms and sweetest fruits.But at a late age, dry and fruitless,The final stage to which we’re led,Sad is the trace of passions dead:Thus storms in autumn, cold and ruthless,Transform the field into a slough,And strip the trees from root to bough.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
The splendor of youth is, to a point, the splendor of error. Jealous the old, who have everything previewed! The nightingale will never come sing over your wisdom. It won’t, darlin’, it won’t.
— Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers
Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That’s progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
— Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers
Wherever they went—Moscow, Tehran, the Syrian coast, Switzerland—a furnished house, villa, or apartment awaited the young couple. And their philosophies of life were the same: "We have only one life!" So take everything life can give, except one thing: the birth of a child. For a child is an idol who sucks dry the juices of your being without any return for your sacrifices, not even ordinary gratitude.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
How sad, however, if we're givenOur youth as something to betray,And what if youth in turn is drivenTo cheat on us, each hour, each day,If our most precious aspirations,Our freshest dreams, imaginationsIn fast succession have decayed,As leaves, in putrid autumn, fade.It is too much to see before oneNothing but dinners in a row,Behind the seemly crowd to go,Regarding life as mere decorum,Having no common views to share,Nor passions that one might declare.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. But it was too late to start being young again. I didn't believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what's more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we're never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it's too late to change. You're a hundred-percent restless, and it's set that way for good.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you’re young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn’t always there.
— Amanda Craig, In a Dark Wood
Do something very praiseworthy in your youth or in your middle age so that you can spend all your time talking about it in your old age!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The inquisitive nature of youth should carry over into our adult lives. Challenging the status quo and enticing curiosity should be a daily practice of adult life.
— Farshad Asl, The "No Excuses" Mindset: A Life of Purpose, Passion, and Clarity
And you are more than the mistakes of your youth. You are more than the label you’ve been assigned by people who might love you, but don’t really know who you are anymore.
— Penny Reid, Grin and Beard It
Young people sometimes use their innocence as an excuse to be unwise.
— David A.R. White, Between Heaven and   Hollywood: Chasing Your God-Given Dream
Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook