To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
By Fate full many a heart has been undone, And many a sprightly rose made woe-begone; Plume thee not on thy lusty youth and strength: Full many a bud is blasted ere its bloom.
Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.
Alas! the slippery nature of tender youth.
Youth is a mortal wound.
You humiliate a rich person and they're still rich. You humiliate a brilliant person and they're still smart. A person who is well connected is still the king of England. But if you humiliate a young person, you take away the only form of power they have.
Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.
There is something tenderly appropriate in the serene death of the old. Nothing is more touching than the death of the young, the strong.
I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...
I tried to picture a young, insecure Edward and couldn't, but it was nice to know that once he'd been a boy. Sometimes it felt like Edward had sprung full grown from the head of some violent deity,like a vicious version of Athena.
