“Once upon a time we were young, our dreams hung like apples waiting to be picked and peeled.”— Shane Koyczan, blog.ted.com
“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”— J.K. Rowling, amazon.com
“I was twelve. What did I know? How could I have imagined then how alone I would become.”— Dorianne Laux, amazon.com
“Hopefully as you get older, you start to learn how to live with your demon. It’s hard at first. Some people give their demon so much room that there is no space in their head or bed for love. They feed their demon and it gets really strong and then it makes them stay in abusive relationships or star…”— Amy Poehler, amazon.com
“Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt.”— Sandra Cisneros, amazon.com
“But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when…”— Sandra Cisneros, amazon.com
“Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.”— Lena Dunham, amazon.com
“There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind.”— Shel Silverstein, amazon.com
“Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do.”— Sylvia Plath, poetryfoundation.org
“High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vital…”— Daniel Coffeen, thoughtcatalog.com
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.com
“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.com
“Don’t ever grow up. Don’t become a bore. Don’t ever let the Man get to you.”— Sophia Amoruso, amazon.com
“He's one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.com
“When I was seventeen, I used to write on average two poems a day, each of them taking me about twenty minutes. Their quality was doubtful, but I didn’t even try to write better then, thinking that I was performing little miracles and that over miracles I didn’t need to think. Now I know that, indeed…”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com