I'm old enough to know better, but I'm still too young to care.

Old age is a prison surrounded by beauty.

Adolescence - is it the first time in life we discover we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

I'm not a child anymore. I'm old enough to reach for the stars.

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

It is not right if I am wrong. But if I am young, and right, what does my age matter?

You are too young to live here. . . it is a good place to sit and remember. But you have still to create your memories.

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed, but your childhood.

You know what you have to do. . . Your job, your purpose is to get accepted, get a cute girlfriend, think up something great to do for the rest of your life. What if you're confused and can't imagine a career? What if you're funny looking and can't get a girlfriend? You see? No one wants to hear it. But the terrible secret is that being young is sometimes less fun than being dead.

Being a teenager sucks, but that's the point, surviving it is the whole point. Quitting is not going to make you strong - living will.

The hardest part about growing up is letting go with what you have been accustomed to and moving on with something that you haven't experienced yet.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone connected to it to hell.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires, too soon, too soon - before life itself.

Sometimes, I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other, but that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says. Do you know, I'm responsible. I was spanked when I needed it, years ago. And I do all the shopping and house cleaning by hand.

Adults are obsolete children.

There is a time somewhere between early adolescence and job-hunting - when a young man is ripe for a certain solitude; when he can hear things he could not hear before, and will be deaf to later.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

You know you're old when you lost all your marbles.

I knew you forever, and you were always old.

I know what I know. I am the child I was, living the life that was mine. I am young and half asleep.

At six, I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself. I was the exile, who sat all day in a knot. I will speak of the little childhood cruelties, being the last give, and the last taken - of the nightly humiliations when Mother undressed me, of the life of the daytime, locked in my room - being the unwanted, the mistake. The closet is where I rehearsed my life. I did not question it. I hid in the closet as one hides in a tree. I planned my growth and my womanhood as one choreographs a dance. All that remains from the year I was six is a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot, so that I might hear the unsaid more clearly.

The mother remembers the baby she was and never locks and twists or puts lonely into a foreign place.

The trouble with being a woman, Skeezix, is being a little girl in the first place. Not all the books of the world will change that.

Not all knives are for stabbing the exposed belly. Rock climbs on rock, and it only makes a seashore. Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses, and now she has no wastebasket into which to keep her youth.

The child in me is dying.

Perhaps, when I'm an antique, as a gift, cranky but firm, I'll take in boarders who admire my ocean view.

Oh mother, after this lap of childhood, I will never go forth into the big people's world as an alien, a fabrication, or falter when someone else is as empty as a shoe.

Oh Gull of my childhood, cry over my window over and over, take me back, oh harbors of oil and cunners, teach me to laugh and cry again that way that was the good bargain of youth.

Youth was still burning inside her. Her dreams were still fresh. She still owned desire.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shoes up all by itself.

Wet-behind-the-ears my ass. I may be young, but I'm not inexperienced.