c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The noontide of my life is starting,Which I must needs accept, I know;But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,I want you as a friend to go!My thanks to you for the enjoyments,The sadness and the pleasant torments,The hubbub, storms, festivity,For all that you have given me;My thanks to you. I have delightedIn you when times were turbulent,When times were calm... to full extent;Enough now! With a soul clear-sightedI set out on another questAnd from my old life take a rest.Let me glance back. Farewell, you arboursWhere, in the backwoods, I recallDays filled with indolence and ardoursAnd dreaming of a pensive soul.And you, my youthful inspiration,Keep stirring my imagination,My heart's inertia vivify,More often to my corner fly.Let not a poet's soul be frozen,Made rough and hard, reduced to boneAnd finally be turned to stoneIn that benumbing world he goes in,In that intoxicating sloughWhere, friends, we bathe together now.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
The young never expected to die.
— Edoardo Albert, Edwin: High King of Britain
No one can ever know you like those with whom you've shared the pangs of your youth.
— Sarah Domet, The Guineveres
Once upon a time we all walked on the golden road. It was a fair highway, through the Land of Lost Delight; shadow and sunshine were blessedly mingled, and every turn and dip revealed a fresh charm and a new loveliness to eager hearts and unspoiled eyes.On that road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple flowers dripping from her fingers.We may long have left the golden road behind, but its memories are the dearest of our eternal possessions; and those who cherish them as such may haply find a pleasure in the pages of this book, whose people are pilgrims on the golden road of youth.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Golden Road
Years from now, I will pass this same park, and I won’t remember any of this.Instead, I will feel something like a spark— a heat like Augustin a suburban town,and a desire to groweven when I know I’ll be cut down.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
We skip school and we ditch chores. We haunt shopping malls and grocery stores. House parties grow dull, but Amy's boyfriend is a dealer and we find ways to pass the time.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
What the hell? Die in a fire, youth. Die in a fire.
— Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている 1
Youth is something I never wanna take for granted. I just want to smile and live life.
— Tyler, the Creator
They're looking for guys like us, he says, young and hungry, not done yet. I say I'm not hungry, Rick, all I am is angry. He says that'll do just fine.
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 9: The Big Ride
Apathetic in my adolescence,my heart is fluorescent. It flickerslike liquor store lights in the ghetto.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearing the manifesto of her generation. Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness. Submitting to a generation mentality (to this pride of the herd) has always repelled me. After Miss Broz had developed her provocative argument (I've now heard it at least fifty times from people her age) that all mankind is divided into those who give hitchhikers lifts (human people who love adventure) and those who don't (inhuman people who fear life), I jokingly called her a "dogmatist of the hitch." She answered sharply that she was neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist, that those were all words of ours, that we had invented them, that they belonged to us, and that they were completely alien to them.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
Weren’t all ‘young’ people the same? Disillusioned, world-weary, bored out of their minds? The constant need for adventure, that constant need to ridicule suburban life and jobs that keep you desk bound and microwavable food and comfort.Everything was fake and every day had to be a day closer to the genuine. They were always single, these ‘young’ people, childless, unattached, maybe rich. Selfish. He remembered being 'young’ and being horribly, horribly selfish. How infinite he felt. Now he found comfort in the predictability of the train. But he didn’t miss his old self. Even then he knew he was lost.
— Eliza Victoria, A Bottle of Storm Clouds: Stories
You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.""You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens.""Then what happens?""You won't be able to find the treasure.""Will I be too old to look for it?""No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
I suppose, like most young people nowadays, boredom is what you dread most in the world, and yet, I can assure you, there are worse things.
— Agatha Christie, Towards Zero
She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one's parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn't lived it yet.
— Jessie Burton, The Muse
He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire.
— D.H. Lawrence
This whole kissing process was turning out to be far more complicated and stressful than I'd thought it would be.
— W. Bruce Cameron, Emory's Gift
Fly GenerationWe stand tall, we stand proud, we are the ‘fly’ generationWe think what we learn to think and dream with our eyes openWe keep our hearts on our sleeves for it to be brokenbut we can take it, we are the ‘fly’ generation.We question things when we need to understandIts important we know, how it works, where we standWhy all this pain and no explanation?we need answers, we are the ‘fly’ generation.We love to hate and hate to love, what have we become?Since when is that the norm? when did we succumb?The victims will be forgotten and culprits will change faceBut we will still be running, running to win the invisible race.So here’s to the untold stories and six degrees of separationwe can take it, after all… we are the ‘fly’ generation.
— Saahil Prem
We’d like to think that our youth was madder, brighter, happier than it was. It comforts us as we grow older, to believe that once upon a time we danced at dawn in a fountain.
— Robert Nathan, Stonecliff
Young people do not like to be always thwarted.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
When I was young and I was forced to watch Disney films, I would fast forward the good guys, wasn't interested in princes and princesses, only by the villains.
— Nuno Roque
The world was different in the morning. Quiet, unassuming, and somehow bigger, as if it was brimming with possibility. It was, she thought, as if during the day the world went through a shrinking process, gradually condensing the morning’s expansion, only to inflate again during the night
— H.J. Gerald, Blame It on My Youth: Stories by students on the art of being young
I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
They had lied. Time was not a friend that healed all wounds 
— it was the enemy that ravaged and murdered youth.
My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.
— Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven
As a matter of habit, I stop and pick up seashells that interest me, and I always put the ones I really like in a lovely Baccarat bowl in my living room. It's my way of remembering that I once was young and carefree.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the hear of the sun... And perhaps the entire et of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time!
— Ivan Turgenev, First Love
O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the heat of the sun... And perhaps the entire secret of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking you can do everything, perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time!
— Ivan Turgenev, First Love
I know that age, it's a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won't make you fear the future. A pity we can't change over.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Seems to me you put too much stock in the affairs of children. It probably didn't mean anything." "Yes, it meant something. Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Although much has been written of the exploits of Canadians who answered the call to arms in World Wars I and II, nothing has been written about the young men who flocked to join the Cold War. Thanks to Canada's menacing presence, Russia has never invaded Germany.	The author menaced Russia, as a fighter pilot based in NATO Europe during the 1950s. Much of the material herein is derived from his diaries of that period. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Accounts have been embellished. No harm or libel is intended. The harm is to the author's self-image. The diaries reveal that he was brash and intolerant. He considers it one of life's miracles that his friends put up with him.
— R.J. Childerhose, Wild Blue
The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill.
— John Scalzi, The Human Division
The best thing about now, is that there's another one tomorrow.
— Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now
You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.
— Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief
Youth is a blind incongruous beast. It craves food but does not eat, is too timid to eat; it need simply nod to happiness, which strolls by on the street and would willingly stop, but it does not nod; it turns the faucet, permitting time to drain away uselessly and be lost, as though time were water. A beast that does not know it is a beast - such is youth. (Report to Greco)
— N. Kazantzakis
To refuse ever to deny your youth, right up to extreme old age, to battle all life long to transubstantiate your adolescent flowering into a fruit-ladden tree - that, I belive, is the road of the fulfilled man. (Report to Greco)
— N. Kazantzakis
You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
I asked, “When the Rebellions were at its peak doing nonsense, everyone was trying to keep away from the area, yet you were going in, why were you going into that area? Supt. Strachan answered quite frankly, Because I was not afraid. I felt like they are my people, they are my color. I don’t know of anyone born after me that I should be afraid of, that was how I felt. I knew I could’ve walk through Strachan’s Corner, sit down and felt at home, and their parents also accepted me. I came to the conclusion; these kids just need someone to show them some attention. They just wanted to belong, that was what a lot of them were looking for. So I said to myself, if I could assist them I would, and that was what I did. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
I used to feel special, different and wonderful when I was very young, before the world showed me that everything I thought, said, or did was wrong. I lived in the blissfulness of youth without knowing how the world would not except me.
— Jeannie Davide-Rivera, Twirling Naked in the Streets and No One Noticed: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Autism
Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Mrs. Hammon told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I haven't card for him since.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
When I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not going old.
— André Gide, The Counterfeiters
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
Furthermore, unlike so many of his evangelical contemporaries he did not hold the view that the various inter-denominational youth movements represented the most hopeful field of labour; indeed his doctrine of the church left him with little sympathy for that attitude.
— Iain H. Murray, The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones - 1899-1981
[T]hat mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull.
— H.G. Wells
Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....
— Malcolm X
There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away.
— Emma Straub
and while he did all the actual dancing, I remember whirling around and around the porch those hot summer days so long ago and never wanting to stop.
— Julie Reece Deaver
Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.
— Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven
Lots of teenage girls have taken comfort under the wings of half-closeted gay boys.
— Tina Fey
Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth--that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable?
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
we’re too old to be young.
— Caroline Kepnes, You
Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too lateTill the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.Cato learned Greek at eighty; SophoclesWrote his grand Oedipus, and SimonidesBore off the prize of verse from his compeers,When each had numbered more than fourscore years,And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,Had but begun his Characters of Men.Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,Completed Faust when eighty years were past,These are indeed exceptions; but they showHow far the gulf-stream of our youth may flowInto the arctic regions of our lives.Where little else than life itself survives.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.
— Albert Einstein
It's the people who aren't scared who die young.
— Stephen King, Thinner
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I want to be six years old again - just for a day.It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked.But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all.That's what I want. I want to laugh.
— Jaye Murray, Bottled Up
When I looked at them sitting around me, the church in the distance, beyond that our school, with throngs of girls crossing back and forth in the schoolyard, beyond that the world, how I wished that everything would fall away, so that suddenly we'd be sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires, which would, of course, be simple desires — nothing, nothing, just sitting on our tombstones forever.
— Jamaica Kincaid
We have all had stupid youths,' said Mathilde. 'I find them delicious.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
-I was young! I made a mistake, okay! Haven’t you ever made a mistake?-I’m old! Of course I’ve made mistakes, you stupid little shit!
— Drea Damara, Chasing Vengeance
Maybe people are younger when they sleep.
— S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
I'm again a twelve-year old dreamer, a girl fascinated by an ancient piano and with Rona Lubliner's fingers.
— Victoria Avilan, A Small Country about to Vanish
But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns,fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,to touching in the dark. And the old man's?To worms in their garden box; stepping asidea moment in a poem that will remember,fitfully, who made it and the discordand stammer, and change of heart and catch of breathit sprang from. A bending downlightly to touch the earth.
— David Malouf, Earth Hour
I have a computer in my brain,' she said.'So while I'm not going to tell you that I am the smartest or, by any means, the most experienced person in this room, I would suggest that no one use my youth to believe that I am ignorant.' " Cinder
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
We were young, thoughtless - carried away with our own cleverness
— J.K. Rowling
In those days I coercedOracular assuranceIn my favour out of every sign.
— Ted Hughes
when we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Church is not about learning how to be a moral person (though that is what the dominant narrative they hear tells them)
—  it is a place where immoral individuals go in order to receive the grace of God.
Such elderly people were in the habit of saying that he simply had no will-power
—  but it might just as well have been said that he had all his life long only been a many-sided dilettante.
Alice felt a surge of pity for them, stuck as they were within the white-hot glow of youth, when everything seemed so vital, so essential, so important.
— Kate Morton, The Lake House
I wish but to share your gifts as a young boy on his birthday would excitedly rip open his packages to the view of others.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?
— Patton Oswalt
Impatience is the cardinal sin of youth.
— M.T. Bass
He started writing poetry again, but it didn't come as easily. It was hard now to get past the self-consciousness - the silliness, really - of being such a well-established adult applying himself, seriously, to such a youthful joy.
— B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories
Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
There was an old belief that in the embersOf all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemistsCould re-create the rose with all its membersFrom its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume Ah me! what wonder-working, occult scienceCan from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore?What craft of alchemy can bid defianceTo time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.
— James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.
— Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil
Thank God I've wasted my youth already. I don't want to do that again.
— Greg Deane
You are young still. Naturally, one tries this, that and the other, but what one eventually settles down into is the life one prefers.
— Agatha Christie, Death in the Clouds
The world should not pass judgement upon the Negro, and especially the Negro youth, too quickly or too harshly. The Negro boy has obstacles, discouragements and temptations to battle with that are little known to those not situated as he is.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
When I was very young, before I could read, I remember being very interested in comic books.
— Nathan Fillion
And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing some extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable.
— Agatha Christie, The Complete Tommy And Tuppence
It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post 9/11 anxiety and height of Sex and the City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my ming were something like this: 'Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You're trying to tell me a place called 'Barney's' is fancy?'Where are the fabulous gay friends that I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help!
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life.
— Simon Van Booy
Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
I rather would entreat thy companyTo see the wonders of the world abroadThan, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.
— William Shakespeare
That’s the trouble with you young people.” Saying young as though it was a bad thing.“You’re in too darn much of a hurry to notice.”“Notice what, exactly?”“The difference,” she’d replied slowly, as if I were particularly stupid, “between what people want you to see, and what’s real.
— Debbie Howells, The Beauty of the End
With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a with youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one missed whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of brith and race.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
— Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy
Not so many moons ago, he had been able to run to the summit of the temple without losing a single breath; however, now he felt like an old camel that laboured under a load of corn. Years pass so quickly, and the dreams of youth are lost forever.
— Alan Kinross, Longinus The Vampire: Babylon
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.
— Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.
— Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story
How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.
— Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth
The land is encrusted with ephemeral human conceits. That is not altogether good for a youngster; it disarranges his mind and puts him out of harmony with what is permanent. Just listen a moment. Here, if you are wise, you will seek an antidote. Taken in over-dose, all these churches and pictures and books and other products of our species are toxins for a boy like you. They falsify your cosmic values. Try to be more of an animal. Try to extract pleasure from more obvious sources. Lie fallow for a while. Forget all these things. Go out into the midday glare. Sit among rocks and by the sea. Have a look at the sun and stars for a change; they arc just as impressive as Donatello. Find yourself! You know the Cave of Mercury? Climb down, one night of full moon, all alone, and rest at its entrance. Familiarize yourself with elemental things. The whole earth reeks of humanity and its works. One has to be old and tough to appraise them at their true worth. Tell people to go to Hell, Denis, with their altar-pieces and museums and clock- towers and funny little art-galleries.
— Norman Douglas, South Wind
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
— W.B. Yeats
. . . at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to becommenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvelous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dreamscenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits, wider plains, drearier deserts, sunnier fields than are found in nature, overspread our enchanted globe. What a moon we gaze on before that time! How the trembling of our hearts at her aspect bearswitness to its unutterable beauty!
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
whilst you are a youth, think about the aged; whilst you are an aged, think about the youth
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The young have little use for the concept of rebirth, yet the older they get the more appealing the concept becomes.
— Charles Spencer King
There are gains for all our losses. There are balms for all our pains. But when youth, the dream departs, it takes something from our hearts, and never comes again.We are stronger and are better, under manhood's sterner reign, but we feel that something sweet, followed youth with flying feet, and will never come again.Something beautiful is vanished, and we sigh for it in vain. We behold it everywhere, on the Earth and in the air, but it never comes again.
— Karen Heese
But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
— David Nicholls, Us
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
— W.B. Yeats
Insecurities make girls believe they don't have voices and they can't say what they need to say. The more they know the importance of their voices and gain confidence, the better chances of greatness the world will have.
— Paballo Seipei
Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life. They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought - sometimes it isn't much, either. °o°
— Walt Disney Company
This is one of those moments when I wish I could be young forever. Not just stop time for a second, but for an eternity. The old paradox that youth is wasted on the young is not true for us. Neither I nor my friends take our youth for granted. In fact, all of the young people I know are all too aware that someday soon time and gravity won’t be on their side anymore. And there’s nothing we can do about it. So the young do the only thing they can do. They live and they love and they dance and they sing, they dream and they scheme, they ponder and they plan. Like there’s no tomorrow. For tomorrow brings us one day closer to the inevitable and one day further from the impossible. And being young is all about achieving the impossible. Or at least believing you can. The old mistake our denial for ignorance, our immaturity for irresponsibility. We understand the rules of life, we just don’t want to play by them. Not yet. Not today. Not tonight.Because tonight is a good night to be young and alive.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
Drowning in the majesty of the constellations is a reminder that the universe was here long before us, and it will be here long after we’re gone. When our bones become nothing but ash and earth, the world will keep on spinning. People will die, cry, love, and live as if we never were. But we are now. And that’s all that matters.In this moment, we are.Nothing but a boy and a girl. On the cusp of something greater than ourselves.Entering into the unknown and hoping we make it out the other side.With a strong sense of ourselves and only a faint idea of who we want to be.We are what we are. And we. are. now.Young, free, alive.Here, together, loved.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!
— William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
. . . you have blighted the promise of youth, and made my life a wilderness!
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Being young is all about achieving the impossible. Or at least believing you can. The old mistake our denial for ignorance, our immaturity for irresponsibility. We understand the rules of life, we just don’t want to play by them. Not yet. Not today. Not tonight.Because tonight is a good night to be young and alive.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.
— Haruki Murakami
More and more number of youths and adults get addicted to nicotine on daily basis.
— Sunday Adelaja
Respect should be found in your own heart and never demanded, sacraficed, begged for or negotiated. If you have to explain why you deserve it then you never had it.
— Shannon L. Alder
I think that time might be different for young people. The minutes longer, stronger, more vibrant.
— Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You
...youth looks good in anything
—  unpleasant details lose themselves against the unabating vigour of youth...
We sat there smiling at each other, shimmied to a standstill, thinking about all the boys that had wanted us that day, and how none of them had got us, not for a minute; how we'd let them pay for drinks and candyfloss and then run away laughing, their cries of 'Slags!' and 'Bitches' ringing in our ears like respect rather than derision.
— Julie Burchill, Sugar Rush
There is something about the defencelessness 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
It is the courage, the insistence, the ruthless force of youth.
— Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
I do not dye my hair blackso as to be young again and sin againbut because people dye their clothes black in mourning,so I have dyed my hair black, mourning for my old age.
— Rūdagī, Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish & Hebrew Poems
Sometimes there were kids who were simply born to be thirty, or fifty, or seventy; I could see their unfinished teenaged faces overlaid with the transparencies of their aged selves and had to resist telling them so - that the maturity that wanted was going to happen, that someday they would look as completed as they felt, in their fleeting, truest moments.
— Holly LeCraw, The Half Brother
Young people will always need mentors to guide and support them.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Youth is a time of tremendous energy. You should look at the possibilities, not the problems.
— Sadghuru
American diversity rarely applies to money and success.
— Suzanne Munshower
Youth is the last ride with fun, but the first one with responsability.
— Kevi Dhana
Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country.
— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams
There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.
— Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
— Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
— Margaret Atwood
The foolishness of youth with the cynicism of age is a dangerous combination.
— Murad S. Shah
Youth is an unrecoverable asset. Unless you are a hydra, lucky you.
— Anca Ioviţă
It was the flashing lights, and the noise of the machines, and the loud, loud music, all seeming to refract and contract around her, her eyes widening, her hair swooshing, her slow smile shining. She seemed an actual part of the place - all fun, all joy, all shimmery skittering energy.
— Julie Burchill, Sugar Rush
He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn't feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green, full of tall, lush oaks and elms in summer; a creek ran through it, and the kids climbed around on its convolutions shouting, "This way, gang - we'll take a short-cut and head them off at Dead Man's Gulch!
— Ray Bradbury
There are things that money can't buy, things like fresh youth to replace the one you've hardly been aware of, things like lost opportunities which might conceivably have led to nothing, but which on the other hand might have led to fulfillment and serenity and new lives and passionate involvement. (Along, of course, with disinheritance!) And human nature being what it is this is the version you'll unquestionably believe.
— Stephen Benatar
Rickie had a young man's reticence. He generally spoke of “a friend,” “a person I know,” “a place I was at.” When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie's hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the harmless dissyllable “Ansell.
— E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey
The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.
— Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
You'd better make friends with Time, because sooner or later it will catch up with you.
— Eleanor Brownn
I could have blamed it on the intoxication of youth. Others might find fault on just intoxication. My parents would say that it was an act of plain stupidity. Reality would point out that it was Thursday night at college and the youth are prone to err.
— Mara Joaquin, Lost in the Sky
When you think your life is falling apart, it's usually falling together in disguise.
— Charlotte Eriksson
In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are the norm in interactions with people. The approval and disapproval of others become important, and the honest and sincere expression of thoughts and feelings is lost.
— Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living
It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated.
— Thomas Pynchon, V.
The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades
— Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Yes, it's important to inspire the next generation but let's not forget to inspire the now generation too.
— Onyi Anyado
Don’t cause wealth loss to your generation! Life is too short to be little. You have an impact to make on your generation and the time to start was yesterday.
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
Looking around today, I see a lot of young people who act as if they have all the time in the world, and older persons who think this attitude is alright. It is unfortunate that there are young citizens who still believe life begins at forty and that life before forty is non-scoring, and older citizens who still insist that unless you are old, you have nothing to offer, equating age with wisdom.
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
The youth. The youth of Africa. The youth of this world. Are we harnessing the potential of the youth enough? Are the young ones… giving off their best to the continent, the nation, the universe that is giving us so much? Why do we think we can only contribute something after age forty? Are we not causing wealth loss to our generation?
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
Young men and women are causing wealth loss to their generation because they are sitting on inert ideas, bottled-up potential energy and scratching the ground when they should be gliding the skies and perambulating with the stars. These people are so disillusioned they live life without any urgency.
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
Don’t under-rate the scope of your influence in your youth. Don’t think you have all the time to make a difference in this world. Recognize that both brown and green leaves fall to the ground.
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
Don’t wait till you have grey hair before you believe people will take you seriously because scientifically, grey hair is a sign of old age and not necessarily of wisdom.
— Nana Awere Damoah, I Speak of Ghana
Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love; or possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of one's self. . . over the first, careless, shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
Then a soft air, a simple melody, rose to the ears of the suddenly hushed court; and for me, it was May Day again, and I was no longer cold, for the sun burned bright and the grass smelled of its sour-sweet bruisings and an old man fashioned a ballad for the Nut-Brown maid, who would ever be true to her lover. I leaned towards the brightness and, in an abandonment of joy and because there was none to see, tore off my henin and let my nut-brown hair fall to my knees. For I would be a child again, for five minutes, and remember the time when men stopped to gaze at me, with my chaplet of flowers crowning that at which they all marvelled, and longed to touch and stroke and possess.
— Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Trust me, somewhere over the rainbow, happily ever after, etcetera, etcetera - looks far less likely in your mid-thirties.
— Heather McVea, Fallen Elements
If life and youth were not immune to the corrosive effects of time, why should love be any different?
— Jill Archer, Dark Light of Day
Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth
Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.
— William Shakespeare
He smiled against my cheek and kissed me again. "Talking with you would be much more enjoyable than talking with Talia, Lilly." His eyes scanned the floor by my feet. "She's paint by number; you're watercolor." Things like that, moments like those, how do you explain to other people that no one else in the world can make you feel this way?
— Amber L. Johnson
During my completely soul-shredding midlife crisis at the age of twenty-eight, I felt sure I had peaked too soon.
— Jennifer     Harrison, Write like no one is reading
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
There are two times in a person's life when there is the possibility of pure happiness: in youth and in summer.
— Brielle A. Marino, The Last Eve
It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Serving my generation with excellence will in turn mean my generation can lead with excellence.
— Onyi Anyado
Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!
— Jerome K. Jerome
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.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game