Wild Youth Quotes & Sayings

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And sure enough,the youth in question was not his usual dapper self. His face was puffy, his eyes red and wild; his shirt(distressingly unbuttoned)hung over his trousers in sloppy fashion. All very out of charactar: Mandrake was normally defined by his rigid self-control. Somthing seemed to have stripped all that away. Well, the poor lad was emotionally brittle.He needed sympathetic handling. "You're a mess," I sneered "You've lost it big time. What's happened? All the guilt and self-loathing suddenly get to you? It can't just be that someone else called me, surly? — Jonathan Stroud

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me ... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud ... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank ... — Gustave Flaubert

In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free. — Aldo Leopold

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

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! — James Joyce

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow. — Wendell Berry

THE LAKE IN youth's spring it was my lot To haunt of the wide earth 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 tower'd around. But when the night had thrown her pall Upon that spot - as upon all, And the wind would pass me by In its stilly melody, My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake. Yet that terror was not fright - But a tremulous delight, And a feeling undefined, Springing from a darken'd mind. Death was in that poison'd wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining; Whose wildering thought could even make An Eden of that dim lake. — Edgar Allan Poe

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight — Vladimir Nabokov

Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.
Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.
When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken. — Thomas Merton

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. — Beryl Markham

He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing.
A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal. — Victor Hugo

You want to know, companions of my youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside. — Emmanuel F. Lacaba

T-H-U-G L-I-F-E. Meaning what society give us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it?" "Damn. — Angie Thomas

Now this is a most satisfactory and important thing to think about, for brutality will not, - cannot, - accomplish what a kindly disposition will; and, if folks could only know how quickly a "balky" child will, through loving and cuddling, grow into a charming, happy youth, much childish gloom and sorrow would vanish; for a man or woman who is ugly to a child is too low to rank as highly as a wild animal; for no animal will stand, for an instant, anything approaching an attack, or any form of harm to its young. But what a lot of tots find slaps, yanks and hard words for conditions which do not call for such harsh tactics! No child is naturally ugly or "cranky." And big, gulping sobs, or sad, unhappy young minds, in a tiny body should not occur in any community of civilization. Adulthood holds many an opportunity for such conditions. Childhood should not. — Ernest Vincent Wright

As a youth, I listened to the rain from the bowers of pleasure houses,
Red silk drapes translucent in the glow of candlelight.
In my prime, I listened to the rain as a traveler,
The sky low, the river broad, the calls of the wild geese harsh and cold.
Now, grey at the temples, I listen to the rain beneath the eaves of an abandoned cloister.
Has mine been a futile life?
I have no answers, only the sound of raindrops upon worn stone steps,
And long hours yet to pass before the light of dawn. — Sherry Thomas

Heads in the Women's Ward
On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.
Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.
Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death's terror and delirium. — Philip Larkin

When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine. — Horace Bushnell

I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of virgins. See wild stallions mount the prairie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being completed here. But I keep smiling. I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about as long as the youth of America knows what's going on. Brains, brawn, good teeth. tallness. — Don DeLillo

The main focus of Burroughs' Wild Boys tetralogy is an apocalyptic world in which the social order is disrupted enough to allow gay men the possibility of forming seperate communities. The eponymous characters of The Wild Boys band together in the deserts of North Africa to create an alternative to heterosexual society and simultaneously wage war on an intolerant, heterosexual social order that refuses them independence. Burroughs repeatedly links the boys with the youth movements of the late 1960's. He cites Genet's belief that 'it is time for writers to support the rebellion of youth not only with their words but with their presence as well.' The Wild Boys can thus be read as a progression from the riots of Chicago and Stonewall in that they are a radical group of youthful, queer, multiracial revolutionaries who echo Burroughs' own belief that non-violent action is not enough. — Jamie Russell

Winter Liar by Liam Doyle the Incubus
What come once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sunwarmed green succumbs to winter's wind.
And you, my love, were also my best friend,
and had your life to live. The tragedy
was not just my youth's recklessness, although
I trusted much to impulse, whim, freedom,
a destiny excluding doom. Frankly,
youth can be our insanity. But now I'm cured
of that fever, although the price was high;
and chilly April wind can only sigh
at my regrets, yet sun will brighten wind so,
one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.
And summer once more will make winter liar,
but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire. — Juliet Dark

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. — Jack London

There was no fear of sandpaper earth, no sense of danger from a bare-skinned spill, for the boy was a child - a six-foot, one-inch growing child who knew nothing of accident, injury, dismemberment, death - who would study those lessons tomorrow, thank you, but not today. Today, it would be sufficient to be wild and free. — Tony Taylor

I've always liked telling stories. That probably came from my dad, who definitely had the gift of gab and who wove a kind of personal folklore about his youth - stories full of adventure and ghosts and wild antics. — Cullen Bunn

I aspire to be
an old man
with an old wife
laughing at old jokes
from a wild youth. — Atticus Poetry

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun

Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. — Henry David Thoreau

Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme. — Aaron Hill

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

Such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty. — William Shakespeare

Unlike those earlier occasions - mourning a lost affection of his youth - this time there is to be no imagining her altered features, her new occupations, no unknown rival or replacement upon whom to project a wild jealousy. For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one - which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. So he sits and watches the sea and thinks of Mamakay. — Aminatta Forna

The youth had resolved not to budge whatever should happen. Some arrows of scorn that had buried themselves in his heart had generated strange and unspeakable hatred. It was clear to him that his final and absolute revenge was to be achieved by his dead body lying, torn and gluttering, upon the field. This was to be a poignant retaliation upon the officer who had said "mule drivers," and later "mud diggers," for in all the wild graspings of his mind for a unit responsible for his sufferings and commotions he always seized upon the man who had dubbed him wrongly. And it was his idea, vaguely formulated, that his corpse would be for those eyes a great and salt reproach. — Stephen Crane

One of the biggest misconceptions remains that Neil Gaiman spent his youth lurching from bedsit to library and back again, subsisting on a diet of blood-temperature baked beans and the wild leeks he managed to pull from the side of a disused railway track. It is a misconception that he nurtures, whether consciously or otherwise, through omission. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. — James Joyce

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom. — Booth Tarkington

Youth is full of sport, age's breath is short; youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame. — William Shakespeare

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding. — Conrad Aiken

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm currently raising a 15 year old son and an 18 year old daughter, which a guess is my punishment for a wild youth! — Gil Gerard

Love is a wild fire that cannot be contained by any mere element known to man. — Cristina Marrero

At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. — Mark Steyn

Who will you be my Little Ones?
Who will you be, my Little Ones?
Will you dance for the fires of your youth
and run at midnight to water's edge,
diving into summer's heat?
Will you ride a wild mare
to any thought or dream or love of your making?
Will you seek the artistry of your own infatuations
and explore all the reckless and eccentric corners
of your own impetuous world? — Carew Papritz

She had the wild look of someone who hadn't slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine. — Emma Straub

God must be a smell, one of those delicious dreamy aromas that float into the soul on the warm hopeful days of spring. What is God must be one of those smells that beguile and inebriate the mind, who like a fine drunken horse of water the heart now rides, galloping wild in every direction like a river flooding right through the topsoil of your youth, cutting and eroding a groove that will be your life, a canyon sunk deep into the virgin plains and unsawn forests of your early days. — Martin Prechtel

Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage. They are the property of youth, and anyone who expects to feel their thrill throughout his life is a fool. Tranquil rivers often begin as roaring waterfalls, but no river leaps and foams all the way to the sea. Tranquility, however, is often a sign of great, if hidden, power. Intensity and depth of feeling and thought preclude wild outbursts of passion; in sorrow and joy the soul takes careful stock of every situation, and sees that so it must be. — Mikhail Lermontov

The gardener's rule applies to youth and age: When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage. — Henry James Byron

Who will you be, my Little Ones? Will you dance for the fires of your youth and run at midnight to water's edge, diving into summer's heat? Will you ride a wild mare to any thought or dream or love of your making? Will you seek the artistry of your own infatuations and explore ... — Carew Papritz