Misspent Youth Quotes

Which leads us to discuss if, deep down, Edgar Freemantle has decided that when the time comes, he's just going to - in the words of my misspent youth - cry fuck it and crawl in the bucket. ~ Stephen King

Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth. ~ Thomas Pynchon

If publishers are here, I've got a feeling they will agree with whatever I say because the publishing houses are packed full of people who love literature and whose hearts are being broken all the time by what happens, by the reign of the accountants.

There is a phenomenon which I call the Educated Barbarian. This is someone who could have been in school or university for many years, could have won prizes by the score, and at the end has read nothing, knows no history, and above all is totally incurious. Quite a large number of my young friends are like this. They're all utterly delightful. We have a wonderful time together. We gossip, we go shopping. We chat about our friends, but at the slightest mention of anything literary their eyes glaze over. Looking back at my misspent youth, I can remember people who were not particularly literary. They were not even very educated, but they would take for granted that they should have read War and Peace. They did not say, "Oh this is so difficult. Oh this is too long and I don't understand the long words." They just read it. That's what people were like then. ~ Doris Lessing

To play billiards well is the sign of a misspent youth. ~ Herbert Spencer

Escort Mr. Ravenel up to my private apartments, where it seems I'll be giving counsel to yet another of my daughter's tormented suitors. This must be a penance for my misspent youth. ~ Lisa Kleypas

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses ... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread. ~ Angela Carter

As part of my misspent youth I spent too much time in the sun and every few months I have to go and have some basal cell removed from my own craggy features. ~ John McCain

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay. ~ Doris Day

But the southwest wind of Spring brings also remorse. We catch the vague spirit of unrest in the air and we regret our misspent youth. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age. ~ James Thurber

A certain skill at billiards is the mark of a gentleman, but to play too well is the sign of a misspent youth.
Lucien Fairchild ~ Mary Jo Putney

When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we, still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and the craven? A thousand times no! ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed. ~ Michael Cunningham

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth." Psalm 127:4

Arrows in the wrong hands can cause a lot of destruction. Well-trained arrows, however, can save a nation. No arrow will change course mid-flight. I am not saying that a right environment guarantees our children's salvation. It most certainly does not. Children are born sinners. We do however, give them a great head start by helping them to curb passions and learn self-control and other godly traits. They must ultimately repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for personal salvation, and they will still deal with sin as we all must. We do, however, prepare the soil for receiving the seed of God's word. Seed sown in good soil will bear much fruit. ~ Joseph Stephen

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Age in a virtuous person, of either sex, carries in it an authority which makes it preferable to all the pleasures of youth. ~ Richard Steele

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid. ~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

I want to be six years old again - just for a day.
It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked.
But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all.
That's what I want. I want to laugh. ~ Jaye Murray

Yesterday I stood at the temple door interrogating the passersby about the mystery and merit of Love.
And before me passed an old man with an emaciated and melancholy face, who sighed and said:
"Love is a natural weakness bestowed upon us by the first man."
But a virile youth retorted:
"Love joins our present with the past and the future."
Then a woman with a tragic face sighed and said:
"Love is a deadly poison injected by black vipers, that crawl from the caves of hell. The poison seems fresh as dew and the thirsty soul eagerly drinks it; but after the first intoxication the drinker sickens and dies a slow death."
Then a beautiful, rosy-cheeked damsel smilingly said:
"Love is a wine served by the brides of Dawn which strengthens strong souls and enables them to ascend to the stars."
After her a black-robed, bearded man, frowning, said:
"Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods."
Then said a blind man, feeling his way with a cane:
"Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys."
And a feeble ancient, dragging his feet like two rags, said, in quavering tones:
"Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquility of the soul in the depth of Eternity."
And a five-year-old child, after h ~ Kahlil Gibran

Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age. ~ Alfred De Vigny

Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square" already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements. ~ Eric Hoffer

The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely ... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile. ~ Alvin Toffler

I wasn't a nerd, mind you, but I'd spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I'd had limited experience with social interaction. I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils. ~ Brandon Sanderson

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. ~ Oscar Wilde

My sister Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was, strangely enough, less pliable. She did full justice to Pesca's excellent qualities of heart; but she could not accept him implicitly, as my mother accepted him, for my sake. Her insular notions of propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's constitutional contempt for appearances; and she was always more or less undisguisedly astonished at her mother's familiarity with the eccentric little foreigner. I have observed, not only in my sister's case, but in the instances of others, that we of the young generation are nothing like so hearty and so impulsive as some of our elders. I constantly see old people flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride; and are we in these modern days, just the least trifle in the world too well brought up? ~ Wilkie Collins

Physically, we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether we go backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of consciousness. When we think about age differently, then our experience of it changes. We can be physically older but emotionally and psychologically younger. Some of us were in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of re-birth in our 60s or 70s. King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are. ~ Marianne Williamson

To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us. ~ William Hazlitt

These people need me and I need them. That's all I care about. I don't have to toil my youth away trying to get degrees or certificates to work in some soulless corporation. I don't want to find out just before I retire that the only thing that matters in life is how much you tried to make the world a better place. ~ Zainab Amadahy

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

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I, too, am a drum major for justice. I will continue to speak out-LOUD and PROUD- as long as gay youth are killing themselves because someone instilled in them they are not enough. Well, baby, you're more than enough. You were molded with the same care and precision as your heterosexual counterparts. You are unique. God has a special plan for you that only you can fulfill. Live your life! ~ J'son M. Lee

Am committed to creating a Peaceful, Sustainable and healthy world. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Things don't have to come to you in your youth. It's fine for them to come to you when you get older. That's a motto in my household. ~ Miranda Hart

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn't quite happen. I guess I'm someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see. ~ Donald Fagen

One of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth. ~ Machado De Assis

Memories of my youth carried a lot of baggage. ~ Brandon Sanderson

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Master Richard carries so much on his young shoulders, the normal troubles associated with adolescence in addition to sharing Master Bruce's crusade. I only wonder if he knows how casually he is throwing away the years of his youth. And if in the end, he will feel it was worth it. ~ Chuck Dixon

What sort of charge against old age is the nearness of death, when this is shared by youth?
Yes, you will say; but a young man expects to live long; an old man cannot expect to do so.
Well, the young man is a fool to expect it. For what can be more foolish than to regard the uncertain as certain, the false as true?
An old man has nothing even to hope. ' Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than the young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained:
The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long.
And yet! what is 'long' in a man's life? For grant the utmost limit: let us expect an age like that of the king of the Tartessi, who reigned eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty.
Nothing seems long in which there is any . last' , for when that arrives, then all the past has slipped away -only that remains which you have earned by virtue and righteous actions.
Hours indeed, and days and months and years depart, nor does past time ever return, nor can the future be known.
Whatever time each is granted for life, with that he is bound to be content. ~ A.C. Grayling

Now The Head Lines


How do you like your truth?
Gently spoken on breakfast TV
By a man and a woman who sit comfortably
Saying riots, and murder, when will it end?
As they struggle to act as if they are good friends.

How do you like your truth?
Bite-sized in sound bites cut easy to chew, With a talking head saying the victim's like you
And when you've digested the horrors you've seen
You find good, you find evil, and no in-between.

How do you like your truth?
Fantastic, sensational, printed in bold,
Today it's exclusive, tomorrow it's old,
All on the surface with nothin too deep
With a story about animals to help you to sleep

How do you like your youth?
From perfect families with parents thet care,
Or in perfect families but still in despair,
Ten out of ten parents say they'd not choose
To have bad kids like those in the news. ~ Benjamin Zephaniah

Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own. ~ Victor Hugo

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. ~ Walt Whitman

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne. ~ Don DeLillo

It takes a very long time to become young. ~ Pablo Picasso

The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla. ~ Henry David Thoreau