Quotes
Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children.
Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
Every generation is its own secret society.
p. 480
He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.
p. 17
A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
p. 68
[Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
Most adolescents are destructive, I suppose, but the worst are certainly those who justify what they do with a half-baked understanding of somebody's philosophy.
The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.
When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.
Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye! — Night — Goodbye!
