Quotes about Youth

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.

A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue something higher- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

The genius of lyric poetry is the genius of inexperience.

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

A man came up to her. Expensively tailored suit. Okay, he wasn't exactly a man because he was only thirty-five. But he was trying.

When I was in S Club Juniors I had very long, straight, brown hair and I never really played around with it. I was very young and the team told me that I had to leave it alone, so the minute S Club Juniors disbanded I decided to cut it short.

I'm not good at a lot of things. I am not good at keeping my room clean. I am not good at eating healthy. I am not good at sports anymore. I used to be! Not so much anymore.

When you're in the backyard as a kid playing and falling in love with the game and you crush the ball? You do a celebration. You stand and watch it like Ken Griffey Jr. You put your hands in the air like Manny Ramirez. You don't hit the ball and put your head down and run as fast you can. That's not fun. It's okay to embrace that part of a game.

But bit by bit as I got to know Yugoslavia better, I became aware of the slow wearing-down process the government was exerting on Christians. The effort seemed to be centered on the children. Leave the old folks alone, but wean the young people away from the church.