Ah Youth Quotes & Sayings

You were trying to impress her with a story about getting mauled by a thresher?"
"It made sense at the time."
"Ah, youth." He sighed. "Do you know what I would give to be young again?"
"No, what?"
"Nothing. In fact, you'd have to pay me. — Jon Skovron

Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth. — Meg Rosoff

Dust in a cloud, blinding weather,
Drums that rattle and roar!
A mother and daughter stood together
Beside their cottage door.

'Mother, the heavens are bright like brass,
The dust is shaken high,
With labouring breath the soldiers pass,
Their lips are cracked and dry.'

'Mother, I'll throw them apples down,
I'll bring them pails of water.'
The mother turned with an angry frown
Holding back her daughter.

'But mother, see, they faint with thirst,
They march away to die,'
'Ah, sweet, had I but known at first
Their throats are always dry.'

'There is no water can supply them
In western streams that flow,
There is no fruit can satisfy them
On orchard trees that grow.'

'Once in my youth I gave, poor fool,
A soldier apples and water,
So may I die before you cool
Your father's drouth, my daughter. — Robert Graves

They were all growing so fast. In just a few short years they would be all young men and women ... youth tiptoe ... expectant ... a-star with its sweet wild dreams ... little ships sailing out of safe harbor to unknown ports. The boys would go away to their life work and the girls ... ah, the mist-veiled forms of beautiful brides might be seen coming down the old stairs at Ingleside. But they would still be hers for a few years yet ... hers to love and guide ... to sing the songs that so many mothers had sung ... Hers ... and Gilbert's. — L.M. Montgomery

Ah, whither shall a maiden flee, When a bold youth so swift pursues, And siege of tenderest courtesy, With hope perseverant, still renews! — Coventry Patmore

Youth, ah, Youth! all men's desire and sorrow. — Louise Imogen Guiney

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could re-create the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume
Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom-flower? — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ah, Jo, instead of wishing that, thank God that 'Father and Mother were particular', and pity from your heart those who have no such guardians to hedge them round with principles which may seem like prison walls to impatient youth, but which will prove sure foundations to build character upon in womanhood. — Louisa May Alcott

Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning. — Christine De Pizan

It is a great pity," she said, "a girl like you, that instead of teaching or doing needlework, you should not go to Vernon's, as you have a right to do, and work there." "I wish I could," Hester said, with eager eyes. "They tell me you wanted to do something like what I had done. Ah! you did not know it was all to be done over again. This life is full of repetitions. People think the same thing does not happen to you twice over, but it does in my experience, You would soon learn. A few years' work, and you would be an excellent man of business; but it can't be,"' "Why cannot it be? You did it. I should not be afraid - - " "I was old. I was past my youth. All that sort of thing was over for me. — Mrs. Oliphant

A little later Anastasia was sitting before her bedroom fire writing. It has a magic of its own - the bedroom fire. Not such a one as night by night warms hothouse bedrooms of the rich, but that which burns but once or twice a year. How the coals glow between the bars, how the red light shimmers on the black-lead bricks, how the posset steams upon the hob! Milk or tea, cocoa or coffee, poor commonplace liquids, are they not transmuted in the alembic of a bedroom fire, till they become nepenthe for a heartache or a philtre for romance? Ah, the romance of it, when youth forestalls to-morrow's conquest, when middle life forgets that yesterday is past for ever, when even querulous old age thinks it may still have its "honour and its toil"! — John Meade Falkner

Then said I: 'Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth.' But the LORD said to me: 'Do not say, 'I am a youth,' For you shall go to all to whom I send you, And whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of their faces, For I am with you to deliver you,' says the LORD." (Jeremiah 1:6-8) Jeremiah — Val Waldeck

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past,
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives.
Where little else than life itself survives. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system! — William Dean Howells

Ah! Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans! I was unfortunate enough in my youth to come across a vomit-flavored one, and since then I'm afraid I've rather lost my liking for them - but I think I'll be safe with a nice toffee, don't you?"
He smiled and popped the golden-brown bean into his mouth.
"Alas! Ear wax! — J.K. Rowling

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?
Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Lake

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody-
Then-ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight-
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define-
Nor Love-although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining-
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake. — Edgar Allan Poe

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";
(slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see."
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea. — T. S. Eliot

In youth alone, unhappy mortals live; But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive: Discolour'd sickness, anxious labour, come, And age, and death's inexorable doom. — Virgil

Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ah, youth. It's like heroin you've smoked instead of snorted. Gone so fast you can't believe you still have to pay for it. — Josh Bazell

Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child's growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who "can't stop now" to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is"too silly for anything," should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that "bump of inquiry" was put on top of our skulls. — Ernest Vincent Wright

Sweetbuns?" "Tradition among us Two Rivers folk." "Never heard of that tradition." "It's very obscure." "Ah, I see. And what did you do to those buns?" "Sprinklewort," Mat said. "It'll turn her mouth blue for a week, maybe two. And she won't share the sweetbuns with anyone, except maybe her Warders. Joline is addicted to the things. She must have eaten seven or eight bags' worth since we got to Caemlyn." "Nice," Thom said, knuckling his mustache. "Childish, though." "I'm trying to get back to my basic roots," Mat said. "You know, recapture some of my lost youth. — Robert Jordan

The silence of the storm weighs heavily
On their strained spirits: sometimes one will say
Some trivial thing as though to ward away
Mysterious powers, that imminently lie
In wait, with the strong exorcising grace
Of everyday's futility. Desire
Becomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,
Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,
Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her hand
Brushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?
Or is she pedestalled above the touch
Of his desire? He wonders: dare he seek
From her that little, that infinitely much?
And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek. — Aldous Huxley

Give me those days with heart in riot, The depths of bliss that touched on pain, The force of hate, and love's disquiet- Ah, give me back my youth again! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Ere I was old? Ah woeful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known that Thou and I were one,
I'll think it but a fond conceit
It cannot be that Thou art gone! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves! — Jerome K. Jerome

Last night, there was a moment before you got into bed. You stood, quite naked, bending forward a little - talking. It was only for an instant. I saw you - I loved you so - loved your body with such tenderness - Ah my dear - And I am not thinking now of 'passion.' No, of that other thing that makes me feel that every inch of you is so precious to me. Your soft shoulders - your creamy warm skin, your ears, cold like shells are cold - your long legs and your feet that I love to clasp with my feet - the feeling of your belly - & your thin young back - Just below that bone that sticks out at the back of your neck you have a little mole. It is partly because we are young that I feel this tenderness - I love your youth - I could not bear that it should be touched even by a cold wind if I were the Lord. — Katherine Mansfield

Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true! — Edwin Markham

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go. — William Blake

Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn't leave, so I finally had to pretend to get sick to my stomach just to get her out of the room long enough for him to climb out the window and down the tree. He fell, broke his leg. Ah, to be young again. — Amy Sherman-Palladino