Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage. 

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

No one’s serious at seventeen.

A dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out state.

Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.

No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.

Ah, there are no children nowadays.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.

The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another.