top of page
"Childhood is a wilderness."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Youth quotes

"The country has 80 crore youth. They are below 35 years of age. If youth have the skill, they can change the destiny of this country. And we are laying stress on this."

"I love writing about the summer between high school and college. It's the last gasp of really being a teen."

"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."

"The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity."

"Sometimes she walks through the village in herlittle red dressall absorbed in restraining herself,and yet, despite herself, she seems to moveaccording to the rhythm of her life to come.She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,half-turns around...and, all while dreaming, shakes her headfor or against.Then she dances a few stepsthat she invents and forgets,no doubt finding out that lifemoves on too fast.It's not so much that she steps outof the small body enclosing her,but that all she carries in herselffrolics and ferments.It's this dress that she'll rememberlater in a sweet surrender;when her whole life is full of risks,the little red dress will always seem right."

"Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand."

"Do not lose the enthusiasm of your youth."

"You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis

"Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing-able-to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me-and to save me-but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."

"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."

"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."

"I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me."

"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."

"I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no-and stop it-than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity."

"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."

"I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I'd always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I'd ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer."
bottom of page