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“I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“There is a moment when you realise you are not doing what you want to do or being who you want to be. It is at that moment that you become who you really are.”
― Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love

“You're only young once. That is all society can stand.”
― Jane Seabrook, Furry Logic Parenthood

“Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith... Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: â€� It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a in a green dress in a square. ‘It has flowered,â€� the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“...it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter â€� intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa's Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré's dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“All you have to do to quickly become OLD is to slowly GIVE UP being ALIVE.”
― Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift

“I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."
I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old....just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something.”
― Jennifer DeLucy

“I've got so used to my life being challenging and fraught with danger that I don't question it any more. Whether I’m knocking on the door of a hardcore sex shop, walking through suburban streets being verbally abused and spat on, or being threatened on the tube, I don't give in. I don’t dress normally to have an easy life. The pilgrimage down the King’s Road to get to the Shop (Sex: everyone calls it ‘the Shopâ€�), the place I want to hang out and buy stuff, is one of the scariest things I do â€� running the gauntlet of teds who want to kill people like me â€� but nothing will stop me looking the way I want. It’s a commitment.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“One of the most important secrets of staying young is being able to do what you want when you want!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Indeed, he was young, but even the young felt pain. And they felt it the longest.”
― Caroline George, Dearest Josephine

“Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True