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"In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read."
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"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized."

"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."

"What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts."

"For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself."

"That's what is was to be young - to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do."

"What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me."

"A face whose emotions had not yet been battered by experience."
Explore more quotes by Peter Davison

"Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world."

"I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry."

"Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding."

"But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most."

"I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant."

"My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence."

"Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such."
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