A comic strip panel showing Nemo, a small boy in pajamas with rumpled hair, sitting dejected on the front step of a big building. Behind him is part of a huge double door with ornate decoration. — A detail of a panel from *Little Nemo in Slumberland*, by Winsor McCay, 1906

Youth is a fugitive that thinks it’s a hostage.
—Mark Leidner, from “Youth Is a Fugitive”

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.
—Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

I was, in my childhood, determined to cure myself of childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential handicap.
—Orson Welles, quoted in Hortense Hill Memorial Supplement

Disasters tend to look more seductive and exciting in one’s youth than they do later on.
—Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva

Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic.
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Self-consciousness, the curse of English youth.
—Duff Cooper, Operation Heartbreak

Youth is almost always selfish, just as it is almost always conceited.
—Henry James, “The Patagonia”

Terrible day. Texting me pictures in apology. Thank God my youth is ending.
—Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

Nothing makes me happier than to realize that I cannot possibly relive my youth.
—Ilka Chase, Past Imperfect

The lost potential of her youth! It gave her power.
—Jessi Jezewska Stevens, “Weimar Whore”

The injustices my brother and I had suffered in our childhood had made me a rebel against authority, but they had also prepared me to fall in love with justice, the first time I encountered it.
—Mary McCarthy, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood

The unspecifiable crumbs and fluff of pocket-interiors that might have been a material deposit left by the act of remembering childhood.
—Brigid Brophy, In Transit

Childhood, which was a subject constantly discussed, as serfs might discuss serfdom while fond of their masters.
—Rebecca West, letter, on her own childhood

It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem to half-disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.
—Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair

Perhaps I’ve washed off something of the sentimentality of youth, which tends to make things melancholy.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, April 21, 1932

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.
—Jane Austen, Persuasion

If we have secure childhoods, we grow up assuming the world is coherent.
—John Cotter, Losing Music

An black-and-white illustration from an old Hardy Boys novel showing Frank and Joe using a flashlight to illuminate a staircase that appears to be rising out of a wall of rock. — An illustration, most likely by Walter S. Rogers, from the Hardy Boys novel *The House on the Cliff*

In our childhood, character was what you got a beating for, even though you didn't have it.
—Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers

Youth is always something that is happening to someone else.
—Helena Fitzgerald, Griefbacon newsletter

The others look already hard-bitten, as people did then. . . . Maybe youth is an illusion we have gotten better at maintaining.
—Darran Anderson, Inventory

Youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed.
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Beauty is a currency we misspend in our youth.
—Philip Hoare, Albert and the Whale

Youth is a marvellous garment.
—Iris Murdoch, The Bell

It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.
—Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

To be not uncomfortably young, to be boyishly hungry and enviably enthusiastic, to find the world interesting, and, on the whole, faithful to its promises, were happy conditions.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, A Marsh Island

He had lost the first phase of youth like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him.
—Andrew Sean Greer, Less

There is a ruin of youth which is not like age.
—Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Youth is strange; it has resources that experience seems only to take away from us.
—Henry James, “Louisa Pallant”

In youth I looked for flowers
Where now I look for trees.
—Robert Frost, notebook

An oil painting showing two young girls in white nightgowns on a wildflower-covered lawn holding lanterns that are illuminated by candles inside. — Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, by John Singer Sargent, 1885-86

You can’t argue with someone’s childhood.
—Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

Nothing has such a powerful effect on a youthful mind as a sublime and virile despondency.
—Stefan Zweig, Confusion

I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to John O’Hara

My youth tails me like a third-rate private detective too clumsy to keep himself from being seen.
—Budd Schulberg, The Disenchanted

The fine dream of our youth is best preserved among the visionary objects of antiquity.
—William Hazlitt, The Round Table

He sat and frowned blacker & blacker, indignant that there should be such a thing as youth and beauty.
—Charles Lamb, letter, on a visit with William Hazlitt

Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beautiful sight in the world.
—Henry James, Roderick Hudson

Even after twenty-five years I cannot read the jottings of this vanished youth who bears my name without discomfort.
—Cyril Connolly, Encounter

Youth feels deeply it is true, but it has not the same sense of lost opportunities.
—Joseph Conrad, Chance

It is the business of youth to recoil from counsel of gentleness, of skepticism.
—Stefan Zweig, Montaigne

Youth tends to be self-righteous and autocratic, whatever its political beliefs.
—Donald E. Westlake, Ex Officio

Ah, the immoderate receptivity of youth—it can drive an educator to despair, because it is always ready to apply itself to bad ends.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, July 16, 1851

The unmistakable manner of one who has been courted in youth and flattered in middle-age.
—Nancy Mitford, Highland Fling

Two small wood-and-plastic action figures from the 1970s. One is of a dog with a black body and white head, the other is of a boy who is scowling and wears a yellow shirt and a ballcap with the brim tilted up. — The Fisher-Price Bad Kid and his dog, who apparently is known to many kids as Lucky

It is a great conviction of youth from which some people never escape that everyone is having a better time than they are.
—Anthony Powell, notebook

A little romantic but that sits well upon youth.
—Lord Byron, journal

Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.
—Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

We lived in that place called youth where everything is terribly, punishingly final day by day.
—Lucy Sante, “Arleen”

How long it lasts, youth, that time of constant imposture.
—Martin Amis, Experience

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

The only time life is easy is childhood, but by the time a person realizes this, it’s too damn late.
—Frank Bill, Crimes in Southern Indiana

Childhood has no escape from the random impact of images, however little wanted.
—Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends

It is a not uncommon observation that in childhood things happen that could not possibly have happened.
—Robert Aickman, The Attempted Rescue

Only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate.
—Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

The law of evidence that reigns in the domain of childhood is essentially medieval.
—Jill Lepore, New Yorker

What I had planned in my youth has not been completely carried out.
—Alexander von Humboldt

Of course, in the end, life explains all things.
—Sergey Aksakov, Years of Childhood

Issue 18: “Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic.”