“The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.”
“But look behind you, Mary. She nodded towards the dais. One of the musicians seems to be trying to attract your attention. It was Peter. He was standing on the dais smiling across at me. My delight at seeing him was such that I could not disguise it - did not try to disguise it.”
“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”
“Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.”
“Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it s more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it s just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body.”
“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. The matron doesn t want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
“No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.”
“The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn t owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.”
“My message for all my readers is: Don t believe in those who claim that youth is a passing disease you just have to get rid of. Don t believe, that maturity is a goal and an asset to go after. Nothing will ever be ready, that is what makes life interesting. Read!”
“Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That s what s called ingenuousness.”
“Due to some dim but irresistible notion of the way things are, it is simply not possible, out of order, not apprpriate to the situation at hand, if, within the circle of those who are experienced and advanced in years, the young person declaims ethical generalities. Young people will again and again find themselves in a situation that is so irritating, astounding, and incomprehensible to them that their word falls on deaf ears, while the word of an older person is heard and has weight even though its content is no different at all. It will be a sign of maturity or immaturity whether this experience leads them to understand that what is at stake here is not the stubborn self-satisfaction of old age, or the anxious effort to keep youth in their place, but the pereservation or violation of an essential ethical law. Ethical discourse needs authorization, which youth are simply not able to bestow upon themselves, even if they speak out of the purest pathos of their ethical conviction. Ethical discourse does not merely depend on the correct content of what is said, but also on the speaker being authorized to say it. Its validity depends not only on what is said, but also on who says it.”
“If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I ve drunk it all!”
“I was so tired of this ceaseless, day-to-day tug-of-war between my hormones and my head, my vanity and my virtue. I felt very much as though I were caught in the middle of some dreadful battle in which taking a side of my own would mean certain misery in either case.”
“Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”
“She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.”
“I had no idea how free we were. That s how free I was.”
“...it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank (27-8).”