Incarcerated Youth Quotes

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? ~ William Shakespeare

Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.

And tell how trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song-

Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death. ~ James Clarence Mangan

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here
the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay. ~ Annie Dillard

If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. ~ Rosalynn Carter

We're constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth. ~ Christopher McDougall

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes. ~ Michelangelo

How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth? ~ John Boyne

The product of this inner life is a living product. It will be needed when the youth returns home weary and dust-laden, when the soldier is wounded, when the wealth is squandered away and pride is humbled, when man's heart cries for truth in the immensity of facts and harmony in the contradiction of tendencies. Its value is not in its multiplication of materials, but in its spiritual fulfilment. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If things did not move on and vanish, we should see no beauty anywhere.

If youth had only the heat of movement, it would get parched and withered. But there is ever the hidden tear, which keeps it fresh.

The cry of the world is not only "I have," but also "I give." In the first dawning light of creation, "I have" was wedded to "I give." If this bond of union were to snap, then everything would go to ruin. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the - to me - extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in the Pantomimes. ~ Charles Dickens

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills - by destroying the American way of life. Radio ~ Louis L'Amour

When one was full of energy and enthusiasm the world was an apple, the future was way beyond the horizon and only the present was pertinent. ~ Jeff Tikari

Feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments - the authorised object of their youth - could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them. ~ Jane Austen

In youth, it is common to measure right and wrong by the opinion of the world, and in age, to act without any measure but interest, and to lose shame without substituting virtue. ~ Samuel Johnson

Because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young. ~ Meg Wolitzer

As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was time for buds to blossom, what did that matter? ~ Marcel Proust

But he had been the victim of the world's most common crime - his youth had been kidnapped by a thing called time. It had likely also been raped, dismembered, and buried somewhere never to be seen again ~ Aurelio Voltaire

...we had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a big promise that will never be kept. ~ Patrick Modiano

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him? ~ Milan Kundera

We've all recognized the moment when the world has handed us a situation that is bigger than our youth can handle, and we have to grow up in a second. And when you do get to the other side, all it does is take us to this new level of existence that is more beautiful and more complex and, in some ways, more painful. ~ Brie Larson

I'm a pretty active person. I love yoga, crossfit, Zumba, and got to get that occasional hike in at Runyon Canyon when I can. I also love mentoring youth. ~ Sufe Bradshaw

It was here the land spoke to him most, in a region that lay high in the north of what was now Kazakhstan, though to the nomads with whom he was to spend the next three summers, all of Central Asia was one land, divided not into states but into mountain and steppe, desert and oasis. The steppe nomads made him feel he was looking back in time--his time. It was the strangest sensation, the first day he was invited to break bread with them. It was as though a mountain inside him were melting, leaving him naked and cleansed, entirely in his own skin, the skin he used to inhabit in the valley of his youth...before he had to don a thousand skins. In the steppe, he was undisguised, unwary, unwanting. ~ Uzma Aslam Khan

Being a living trans person means vigilance. For a non-passing trans person, there is no safe space. It is not who we are kissing, but our very heights, our voices, and the size of our hands that catalyze hatred and violence. Forget activism; simply negotiating one's world every day, constantly judging, adjusting, scanning one's surroundings, and changing clothes to go from one role to another can be overwhelming.

Add to that cases of family disownment, poverty, homelessness, HIV. When a recent study of transgender youth reports that half their sample had entertained thoughts of suicide, and a quarter of them had made at least one attempt, I am not surprised. ~ Ryka Aoki

Her character became a label based on what she wore
The girl in the mini skirt soon began to be called a whore ~ Manali Manan Desai

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare
where others lack the courage
to plunge again into the elemental. ~ Thomas Mann

People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin ... Today's youth are moved by other slogans ... Order, Hierarchy, Discipline. ~ Benito Mussolini

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I grew up loving TV so much. It was such an integral part of my youth, and I was completely an Emmy geek. ~ Jon Cryer

God help us for we knew the worst too young. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The consciousness-raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical. ~ Hillary Clinton

Let's get one thing straight:when gangs of youth throw stones at passing cars,shout abuse at innocent people going about their daily business or beat up random passers-by,they are not doing it 'because there is nothing to do' they are doing it because it's fun and in modern day, punishment-free Britain, there is no reason for them not to. ~ Frank Chalk

Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die. ~ Jack London

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I have a theory that I did most of my observing probably before I was twenty, stored it, and am still drawing on it. ~ Joyce Grenfell

It is a strange thing to recall; but as I fell asleep, I was wondering how it might feel to be courted for one's beauty. I expect Pythagoras would have told me that in some past life, as youth or woman, I had been cruel to my lovers, and had chosen to make amends. In my time I have talked with many philosophers, who have expounded to me the ways of the gods with men. Out of them all, Pythagoras' belief seems to me the most just, supposing it is true. But then, if it is, and all these things befall us, unless we have the Sight we shall never know. ~ Mary Renault

All college students are being asked to sign an official statement to the effect that they "sympathize with the Germans and approve of the New Order." Eighty percent have decided to obey the dictates of their conscience, but the penalty will be severe. Any student refusing to sign will be sent to a German labor camp. What's to become of the youth of our country if they've all got to do hard labor in Germany? ~ Anne Frank

The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them. ~ Noah Webster