Age That Boys Quotes & Sayings

If someone has a boy who gets to age 18 without something [a bone] being fractured, that kid has been overly controlled. — Laura Schlessinger

The problem with boys your age is that they're your age. — Karen Bennett

It's the old who need work. They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it - making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. — Rose Macaulay

One out of every four. I have repeated this statistic over and over and still cannot fathom the depth of what it really means. One out of every four girls is sexually abused before the age of eighteen. For boys, the number is one out of six.9 This means one out of every four women at the grocery store, at the bank, at the mall, in the pew at church, and everywhere in "normal" life have had this traumatic experience. For me as a teacher, this means that one out of every four of my precious eighth grade girls will, before they graduate from high school, become one of those victims. — Mary Frances Bowley

Boys are rewarded for playing games where they line up by height and then run into walls. Perhaps I'm making that up
or perhaps you should do a Google search for "Guy Runs into Wall for Fun."
Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse.
From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman's body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it's an amusement park. From forty-five on, it's a terrarium.
Bring your sense of humor with you at all times. Bring your friends with a sense of humor. If their friends have a sense of humor, invite them, too — Gina Barreca

I think that other girls and boys my age will maybe see that I'm so accepting and be accepting of other people, too. — Kylie Jenner

I swallowed the urge to sigh. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that I don't really work with anyone my own age. Except on the rare occasions where Joey or Danika decide to call me up for a chat, I am the lone adult in a sea of children, like Captain Hook finally taking full responsibility for the Lost Boys after getting rid of that loser Pan. — Mira Grant

I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy. — Wayne Dyer

This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life: I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have, since I was a little boy. It hasn't gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that it's a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself. — Woody Allen

Only boys who have been handsome from a young age have that arrogance in their smile. — Veronica Roth

I didn't know that I'd like it this much, coaching both boys and coming out all the time and seeing how excited they are to play hockey. It reminds you of when you were that age and you wanted to be out on the ice. — Joe Sakic

Why did the little girls grow crippled While the little boys grow strong The boys allowed to come of age The girls just came along The girls were told sing harmonies The boys could all sing songs That's why little girls grew crippled While little boys grew strong. — Harry Chapin

Girls get their boobs and forget they were ever so gutsy and smart. Boys, too, can display their own brand of clever and funny behavior, but let them get that first erection and they go complete moron for the next sixty years. For both genders, adolescence occurs as a kind of Ice Age of Dumbness. — Chuck Palahniuk

Abner Larrabee's wife, who is a social leader in town, wailed piteously in a letter to the editor of the Mammoth Falls Gazette that her prize peonies had been stoned to death just before they reached the full glory of their bloom. She complained bitterly about "wanton boys who create mischief with their teen-age pranks" and wondered when the mayor was going to do something about the problem of juvenile delinquency. — Bertrand R. Brinley

The reflections that the boys of this age are to be the men of the next; that they should be prepared to receive the holy charge which we are cherishing to deliver over to them; that in establishing an institution of wisdom for them, we secure it to all our future generations; that in fulfilling this duty, we bring home to our own bosoms the sweet consolation of seeing our sons rising under a luminous tuition, to destinies of high promise; these are considerations which will occur to all. — Thomas Jefferson

What will that mean to each of you? It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That's a great age. A year more or less doesn't sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever's Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak. — Ray Bradbury

- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.
I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that. — A.A. Gill

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men. — Keith Ablow

From a pretty early age, my mother realized that I was a little bit more gifted and talented than my own age group. So, she moved me over to play with the boys' travel soccer team when I was about 11 years old. — Abby Wambach

Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I'd dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. "Igor," they called me. "Wicked, spooky." But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project. — David Sedaris

I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153] — Kim Edwards

I am not the only one who sometimes thinks I came from the pages of a book my father wrote.
Maybe it's like that for all boys of a certain - or uncertain - age: We feel as though there are no choices we'd made through all those miles and miles behind us that hadn't been scripted by our fathers, and that our futures are only a matter of flipping the next page that was written ahead of us.
I am not the only one who's ever been trapped inside a book. — Andrew Smith

I remember thinking that I could disguise the way I am by somehow filtering my expression for the sake of juvenile social acceptance or I could say to the world, "Here I am, if you don't like it, don't clap."
-Boys of the Fatherless- — David C. Riggins

Boys that age will say things like that. They don't know how to express exactly how they feel, so they say and do the opposite. They hurt people that way, for no reason at all, and they hurt themselves too. — Haruki Murakami

Within a year, possibly by next fall," he was saying, "something that has never before been done, will be done. NASA will be sending men to the moon. Think of that. Men who were once in classrooms like this one will leave their footprints on the lunar surface." He paused. I leaned in close against the wall so I could hear him. "That is why you are sitting here tonight, and why you will be coming here in the months ahead. You come to dream dreams. You come to build fantastic castles up in the air. And you come to learn how to build the foundations that make those castles real. When the men who will command that mission were boys your age, no one knew. But in a few months, that's what will happen. So, twenty years from now, what will people say of you? 'No one knew then that this kid Washington Irving High School would grow up to do' ... what? What castle will you build? — Gary D. Schmidt

And your mom?" Blake clears his throat. "She's not with us." I remember the conversation Blake and I had on the way down and tense. I can only imagine what my mother will say. But my mother just smiles brilliantly. "That's good! Too many boys your age get spoiled by their mothers. They don't know how to cook, how to do laundry. Tina is going to be a busy doctor. She'll need someone to do all that for her. Better if you're not used to having someone else take care of you. — Courtney Milan

But of course, very few people are Dexter. This is generally a good thing, but in this case it came in handy to be me. Four months after reading a story in the paper about a missing boy, I read a similar story. The boys were around the same age; details like that always ring a small bell and send a Mister Rogers whisper trickling through my brain: Hello, neighbor. — Jeff Lindsay

But I'll tell you the truth,boys, he said. I'd give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It's nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun's in the gettin there. The gettin there. — James Carlos Blake

His parents, Carswell had learned at a very young age, liked things that did what they were told, when they were told. And that didn't include headstrong felines. Or, as it turned out, thirteen-year-old boys. — Marissa Meyer

Every age and degree of understanding should have its proper measure of discipline. With regard to boys and adolescents, therefore, or those who cannot understand the seriousness of the penalty of excommunication, whenever such as these are delinquent let them be subjected to severe fasts or brought to terms by harsh beatings, that they may be cured. — Benedict Of Nursia

I was an altar boy, a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary, I was a choir boy but then at the age of 14 I discovered masturbation and all that went out the window. — Guillermo Del Toro

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes. — Emma Cline

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality. — Vera Brittain

Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school. — Horace Walpole

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. — Emma Cline

The thing about women playing boys is that we're not going to age, and we're not going to go through puberty in the middle of a long-running series. — Pamela Adlon

Anecdotal tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we absorb tales of violence like a sponge. Mythological violence is second nature to us. The real thing is not. War begins long before battle. It begins when we are boys longing for the initiation rite of the warrior and everything it promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War lasts long after the last bullet is fired; into old age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge that no one wants to know about. War is the opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped of humanity. — Alfredo Vea

... that's what old people are here for, - else their experience is of little use. — Louisa May Alcott

What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Women have made tons of progress. But we still have a small percentage of the top jobs in any industry, in any nation in the world. I think that's partly because from a very young age, we encourage our boys to lead and we call our girls bossy. — Sheryl Sandberg

When a boy ... discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork. — Yukio Mishima

Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren't given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub. — Jacqueline Kelly

Anyway, back to the kids."

"Well, one is a girl who looks about your age, and there's a boy." She grinned as she stood. "He's a hottie."

A tiny piece of egg caught in my throat. It was seriously gross to hear Mom talking about boys my age. "Hottie? Mom that's just weird. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

...You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man -- if only you remain a little child. All the world'sgreat have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes catch a firefly. But if one grow to a man's mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could -- and so, it catches no fireflies.' [Merlin] — John Steinbeck

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls. — Winona Ryder

How I preened at that, shamefully so in memory for, while I would have been put off by you calling me "hot" or a "babe" at my age, still having "it" - the illusive "it" factor that transcended looks or age was plausible.

From Prey. Middle-Aged Boys&Girls — Diane Bracuk

Mother said, haven't you seen older boys of your age, that you should take your rotten hands and play with my son's penis?
I held my mouth, and i really stiffled a giggle. Now i understood the bloody vexation and the reckless act performed by our housegirl.
She was fondling my infant part, and i knew she was horny and lost in the act. — Michael Bassey Johnson

I've come to realize that love is tragic, somewhere down the line it's inevitable. Fight for it. — Ann Marie Frohoff

Being a father is the hardest job on the planet, because we don't have parental instincts like women have. You have to learn how to be a father before you even become a father, from a very young age. It's necessary to override what we're told in society a father should be, like if your son falls and scrapes his knee, you got to be tough. Baseball and all that are cool, but it's the tenderness and interactions that are really important. Boys are different; we have to impart that sensibility and that tenderness to them. — Malik Yusef

At twenty years old, Michael had vague plans to make changes in his life, but turning blue whilst stood in a walk-in bath in an old people's home wasn't one of them. Usually boys of his age might consider changes along the lines of smoking less grass at home, at college or at work, to be a good idea. Or maybe spending less time on that solitary pursuit common to men of his age across the globe. Enjoyable though he found it, he was going to cut back on the procrastination, but that was going to have to wait. — Dylan Perry

Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal misbehavior, "Boys will be boys." Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found. — Bell Hooks

She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toes shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is not a girl's dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so. — Laura Harrington

It would be interesting to remember the dreams I had here, at the Del Mar, more than ten years ago. I probably dreamed about girls and punishment, the way all boys that age do. — Roberto Bolano

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?

Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness. — Kate Walbert

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together - whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying. — James Baldwin

Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts."
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years. — Halldor Laxness

The feeling of the supremacy of general over particular, of law over fact, of theory over personal experience, took root in my mind at an early age and gained increasing strength as the years advanced. It was the town that played the major role in shaping this feeling, a feeling which later became the basis for a philosophic outlook on life. When I heard boys who were studying physics and natural history repeat the superstitious notions about "unlucky" Monday, or about meeting a priest crossing the road, I was utterly indignant. I felt that my intelligence had been insulted, and I was on the verge of doing any mad thing to make them abandon their shameless superstitions. — Leon Trotsky

At a young age, boys learn that to express compassion or empathy is to show weakness. They hear confusing messages that force them to repress their emotions, establish hierarchies, and constantly prove their masculinity ... whether boys and later men have chosen to resist or conform to this masculine norm, there is loneliness, anxiety, and pain, — Jennifer Siebel Newsom

Years ago I sang on a track using that voice and someone asked, 'Who is that terribly depressed man' ... But Patrick loved it. He said, 'You sound like a young boy, like a child, like an old woman, like an old man,' and really, we all have all of those things inside of us. I don't do any vocal gymnastics to make the voice better as I age. If it comes out rougher, then it's true to what's happening. Singing is who I am. I didn't train for it, any more than I trained for anything else I did. I probably should take better care of myself physically, but it goes against the grain. — Lisa Gerrard

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

India's sex ratio is 1000 boys for 940 girls. Who creates this disparity? It isn't God. Don't fill your coffers by sacrificing the mother's womb. People feel that sons will take care of them when they are old. But I have seen aged parents in old-age homes. I have seen families where one daughter serves parents more than five sons. — Narendra Modi

When I was in third grade
the age of many of the boys here
my parents had debated whether or not to buy me a pair of [special soccer shoes] ... Here in Bolivia most of the kids played in bare feet, and they had as much fun as we ever had. Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something that we do only in comparison to others. I took off my shoes. — Eric Greitens

I think girls from a young age know what they want, and boys kind of have to keep up and catch up to them. Even in kindergarten, girls are pretty much the ones that like the boy first and the boys are like, 'Oh, I want to play with my trucks.' They think it's not cool. I think girls are definitely more ahead than boys. — Madeline Carroll

Yes, Taylor learned at a very young age that the only way to get boys to shut up and play fairly was to show them that you took crap from no one. — Julie James

In Connecticut, for example, a man confessed to having had sexual relations with a variety of animals since the age of ten; Massachusetts executed several teenage boys for buggery. Sexual relations with animals required harsh punishment, for colonists believed that these unions could have reproductive consequences. The mating of humans and animals, they feared, would produce monstrous offspring. For this reason, colonists insisted on punishing not only the man but also the beast, who might bear such monsters. — John D'Emilio

She was probably used to testing her maturity and newfound confidence around hesitant boys closer to her age, but the lesson to be learned was that unlike boys who are intimidated by feminine boldness, men like me are inflamed by it. — R.S. Grey

Aunt Viney (short for 'Lavinia'), viewed in the grey daylight that came in through the dining-room window, was always a rather imposing spectacle. She was fifty-one years of age, and had large staring eyes, quick bustling movements, more than a tendency to stoutness, a menacing optimism that was not quite matched by a sense of humour, and the most decided opinions upon everything. She was an excellent 'manager', and for more than a decade had lived at the Manse with her sister and brother-in-law and their children (there had been boys at one time), looking after them all with undoubted if rather relentless competence. — James Hilton

Distinguish yourself, my mom had told Alina and me, in an age where girls often make themselves too available to boys, by making him work a little for your attention. He'll think he's won a prize when he gets it, and he'll work that much harder to keep it. Boys turn into men and men put a premium on what's hardest to get. — Karen Marie Moning

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves. — Joyce Johnson

A boy, by the age of 3 years, senses that his destiny is to be a man, so he watches his father particularly-his interests, manner, speech, pleasures, his attitude toward work ... — Benjamin Spock

Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled - a project he'd worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That's why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved. — Temple Grandin

I don't think it's proper for a girl to have three boyfriends." Jennifer now begins to sound her age, and more like a grandmother.
Sally attempts to clear up any confusion. "They're not my boyfriends, they're just boys who are my friends."
"How could I have ever misunderstood that? — Carroll Bryant

So that's how we end up helping Aviva pick out a male escort. Even Darcy is impressed with Eugene's organization; each profile in the boy binder has two pictures, a head shot and a full-body shot, and lists essential information: age, school, height, weight, extracurriculars, hobbies, and dance ability (which ranges from "occasional Dance Dance Revolution participation" to "so good he could back up the Biebs"). — Flynn Meaney

I think it'll be interesting. The Aborigines certainly are, Lizabeth said. They have a tradition called the walkabout. It's a challenge for boys when they come of age. I don't know about the girls-the book didn't say. And grown men walkabout, too, when they're troubled.
What's a walkabout?
The book said it's to find your true self, but I don't really know what that means Lizabeth said. — Erika Tamar

Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing. — Stephen King

At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.
Then you grow up. — John Marsden

I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it. — Mat Johnson

Uriah looked better than he did an hour ago
he washed the blood from his mouth, and some of the color returned to his face. I'm struck, suddenly, by how handsome he is
all his features are proportionate, his eyes dark and lively, his skin bronze-brown. And he has probably always been handsome. Only boys who have been handsome from a young age have that arrogance in their smile. Not like Tobias, who is almost shy when he smiles like he is surprised you bothered to look at him from the first place. — Veronica Roth

Puberty was not kind to me. I had acne, eczema and had a stye in my eye, so it was quite hard to go in to somewhere where the majority were boys. At that age, they were quite vocal about what they thought of your looks. — Sophie Wu

We started when I was in the fourth grade, which would have made me ten, I guess. It's different for everyone, but at that age, though I couldn't have said that I was gay, I knew that I was not like the other boys in my class or my Scout troop. While they welcomed male company, I shrank from it, dreaded it, feeling like someone forever trying to pass, someone who would eventually be found out, and expelled from polite society. Is this how a normal boy would swing his arms? I'd ask myself, standing before the full-length mirror in my parents' bedroom. Is this how he'd laugh? Is this what he would find funny? It was like doing an English accent. The more concentrated the attempt, the more self-conscious and unconvincing I became. — David Sedaris

Distinguish yourself [ ... ] in an age where girls often make themselves too available to boys, by making him work a little for your attention. He'll think he's won a prize when he gets it, and he'll work that much harder to keep it. Boys turn into men and men put a premium on what's hard to get. — Karen Marie Moning

Sacrifice counts for a lot in sport. From a young age, I couldn't do the normal things that the boys of my age get to do. Maybe you have a nice car or a nice house, but at times you just want to be a normal guy and you can't. — Mario Balotelli

My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad. When my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that? — Andy Kaufman

We must not close our eyes to the fact that there are conspiring men who would pollute young boys, and girls of corresponding age, for sake of increasing profits. — David O. McKay

When I grew up, the thing boys would do during the summer is work tobacco because it was a cheap product back then. I didn't want to do that. From an early, early, early age, I was like, 'I like music. This performing thing comes easy.' And perhaps that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing today. Being a musician. — Maceo Parker

Then it occurred to her (Elizabeth Keckley) that if Tad (Lincoln's son) had been a colored boy rather than the son of a president, and a teacher had found him so difficult to instruct, he would have been ridiculed as a dunce and held up as evidence of the inferiority of the entire race. Tad was bright; Elizabeth knew that well, and she was sure that with proper instruction and hard work, a glimmer of his father's genius would show in him too. But Elizabeth knew many black boys Tad's age who could read and write beautifully, and yet the myth of inferiority persisted. The unfairness of the assumptions stung. If a white child appeared dull, the entire race was deemed unintelligent. It seemed to Elizabeth that if one race should not judged by a single example, then neither should any other. — Jennifer Chiaverini