All Quotes By Tag: Youth
“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
“My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now – it seems I’ve learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.”
“I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.”
“Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.”
“Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.”
“I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not.”
“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.”
“This is so funny,” said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. “Isn’t this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura.” I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura. “That’s better,” said Ellen. “Isn’t that better?”
“In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.”
“SonnetI am no stranger in the house of pain;I am familiar with its every part,From the low stile, then up the crooked laneTo the dark doorway, intimate to my heart.Here did I sit with grief and eat his bread,Here was I welcomed as misfortune’s guest,And there’s no room but where I’ve laid my headOn misery’s accomodating breast.So, sorrow, does my knocking rouse you up?Open the door, old mother; it is I.Bring grief’s good goblet out, the sad, sweet cup;Fill it with wine of silence, strong and dry.For I’ve a story to amuse your ears,Of youth and hope, of middle age and tears.”
“I’ve officially turned into a loser,” she whispered cynically. “I’m looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I’ve had my ‘going out and having fun’ quota for the year, I guess, and it’s June.”
“Your knowledge of failure is the way for the new phase of it!”
“from what we cannot hold the stars are made”
“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.”
“Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,But young men think it is, and we were young.”