Lapham’s Quarterly

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

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.

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

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

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

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

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.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

Bright youth passes as quickly as thought.

Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

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.

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

The young man must store up, the old man must use.

Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children. 

The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.

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.

Ah, there are no children nowadays.

No one’s serious at seventeen.

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

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

Youth, youth, springtime of beauty.

A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.

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

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

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.