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"She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four."
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Exlpore more Youth quotes
"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."
"I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness, but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference that was only pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether."
"We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future."
"At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly."
"The secret of staying young is to be simple and happy like a child."
"I am life,' the girl said.'What?' he said, startled.'To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I'm life and when you're done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don't feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.'Nick said, 'I'm thirty-four and I don't feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.''It will,' she said."
"Don't you think you're quite young?''I'm twenty-one,' said Brida. 'If I wanted to start learning ballet, I'd be conseidered too old."
"What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them."
Explore more quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
"She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient."
"Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent."
"Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain."
"Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization."
"This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden."
"On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist."
"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed."
"There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."
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