Quotes & Sayings About Being Young And Not Knowing What You Want

Annabelle's eyes stung as she stared at him, while need and inexhaustible tenderness gathered like an ache in her body. "I realized something," she said huskily, "when I was standing outside the foundry, watching it burn and knowing you were inside." She swallowed hard against the thickness in her throat. "I would rather have died in your arms, Simon, than face a lifetime without you. All those endless years ... all those winters, summers ... a hundred seasons of wanting you and never having you. Growing old, while you stayed eternally young in my memories." She bit her lip and shook her head, while her eyes flooded. "I was wrong when I told you that I didn't know where I belonged. I do. With you, Simon. Nothing matters except being with you. You're stuck with me forever, and I'll never listen when you tell me to go." She managed a tremulous smile. "So you may as well stop complaining and resign yourself to it. — Lisa Kleypas

Oh, this is the song about the young man who loves a young woman. Has he the right to use such a word as "love"? He knows nothing about life, he knows nothing about her, he knows nothing about himself. All he knows is that he has never felt anything with such force and clarity before. Everything hurts, but nothing is as good. Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn't hurt so much, but nor is it as good. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I think I was 16 when I had the thought of maybe being a writer. And this is complicated, something I only now understand, because when I was young, having dyslexia and not knowing it made reading such an ordeal. — Philip Schultz

The values and assumptions of that household I took in without knowing when or how it happened, and I have them to this day: The pleasure in sharing pleasure. The belief that is is only proper to help lame dogs to get over stiles and young men to put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. An impatient disregard for small sums of money. The belief that it is a sin against Nature to put sugar in one's tea. The preference for being home over being anywhere else. The belief that generous impulses should be acted on, whether you can afford to do this or not. The trust in premonitions and the knowledge of what is in wrapped packages. The willingness to go to any amount of trouble to make yourself comfortable. The tendency to take refuge in absolutes. The belief that you don't have to apologize for tears; that consoling words should never be withheld; that what somebody wants very much they should, if possible, have. — William Maxwell

William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved. — Meg Jay

Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity. — Stephen Chbosky

It's hard to imagine you and Daddy as ever being young and foolish. I figured you just appeared one day, fully grown and knowing all the answers, she teased. — Sharon M. Draper

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I'd try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I'd wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that's how rootless. And that's how fragile. — Ali Smith

Every young man should aim at independence and should prepare himself for a vocation; above all, he should so manage his life that the steps of his progress are taken without improper aids; that he calls no one master, that he does not win or deserve the reputation of being a tool of others, and that if called to public service he may assume its duties with the satisfaction of knowing that he is free to rise to the height of his opportunity. — Charles Evans Hughes

I guess I just sorta figured out early on that most of what people feared was based on things they had heard or read, rather than what they had seen or touched. That being said I do fear that dark in the sort of spooky illustrative sense, that whole idea of "not knowing" whats there. I had really bad problems with the spooks when I was young, but not for fear of aliens. — Andy Biersack

The true art of being young is knowing how to defy gravity and upset as many people as possible while doing it. How to penetrate the great secrets of the universe and damn the torpedoes. How to stir the demons of our destiny ... — Mick Rock

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. — Virginia Woolf

To-day, when the crisis calls you, will you go off and display your recitation and harp on, 'How cleverly I compose dialogues'? Nay, fellow man, make this your object, 'Look how I fail not to get what I will. Look how I escape what I will to avoid. Let death come and you shall know; bring me pains, prison, dishonour, condemnation.' This is the true field of display for a young man come from school. Leave those other trifles to other men; let no one ever hear you say a word on them, do not tolerate any compliments upon them; assume the air of being no one and of knowing nothing. Show that you know this only, how not to fail and how not to fall. — Epictetus

There's a big difference between merely carrying the world inside you and knowing that you do! A madman can produce ideas that resemble Plato's, and a pious little schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can creatively reconstruct profound mythological associations in his mind, ideas to be found in the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn't know he's doing it! He's a tree or a stone, at best an animal, just as long as he doesn't know that. But when the first spark of that knowledge glimmers, he becomes a human being. You certainly don't consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? After all, you see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now, each one of them has the potentiality of becoming a human being, but only when he senses that potential, when he even learns to be conscious of it to some degree, does that potential belong to him. — Hermann Hesse

Not able to stop it, I felt a small smile tilt up the corners of my mouth. "Noted. Althought I must protest that you keep forcing unwanted kisses on me."
"It's the only way to get one. Unwanted indeed." He raised a knowing eyebrow at me. Arrogant Knave. I shook my head, feeling sad and happy all at the same time. "Why do you persist, Wolfe?"
His grin was slow and wicked as he stood back from me, allowing my body and mind to breathe again. "Strategy."
"Strategy?"
He cocked his eyebrow. "At first I thought imposed isolation would make you miss me-"
"Why you arro-"
"-But then I realised that it's being near me you can't resist. And there are only so many kisses you'll take before you give in to me completely, Rogan. — Samantha Young

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? — Jonathan Franzen

He clamped a large hand down on mine as I moved to lift the diaries. I glanced up at him and he shook his head with a small smile. It's painful to read how my stupidity hurt you at the time, but I like being inside you head. I like knowing that while I was struggling with the fact that I had fallen in love with my best friend's little sister, she loved me back more than I could ever hope to deserve. — Samantha Young

She's just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes. — John Green

Sometimes the advantage of being young and bright is not knowing what's impossible. — Cherie Priest

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to know everything about plants, I did not question this. But it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path. — Robin Wall Kimmerer