Boys Quotes - Page 16

• Did all the lets and bars appear
  To every just or larger end,
  Whence should come the trust and cheer?
  Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--
  Age finds place in the rear.
  All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,
  The champions and enthusiasts of the state

  Herman Melville

  Cheer, War, Champion

  Herman Melville (1866). “Battle-pieces and aspects of the war [poems].”, p.22

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• Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but--happiness.

  Herman Melville

  Happiness, Advice, Trying

  Herman Melville, Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle (1987). “Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860: Volume Nine, Scholarly Edition”, p.260, Northwestern University Press

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• The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.

  Herman Melville

  Love, Friends, Sex

  Herman Melville (2016). “Pierre; or The Ambiguities”, p.276, Herman Melville

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• Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet. . . . Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

  Garrison Keillor

  Girl, Feet, Land

  Garrison Keillor (1994). “The Book of Guys: Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• Girls . . . were allowed to play in the house . . . and boys were sent outdoors. . . . Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning how to solve problems through negotiation and roleplaying. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess?

  Garrison Keillor

  Girl, War, Fighting

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• I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have giventhemselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Girl, Memories, School

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• A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

  Mason Cooley

  Wall, Thoughtful, Thinking

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• Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

  James A. Baldwin

  Keys, Order, Needs

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• In the older times it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition. But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of their individual powers.

  Lucy Larcom

  Girl, Mother, Children

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.

  Mark Twain

  Towns, Small Town, Poor

  Mark Twain (2012). “Autobiographical Writings”, p.339, Penguin

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• Then let not what I cannot have
  My cheer of mind destroy.
  Whilst thus I sing, I am a king,
  Although a poor blind boy!

  Colley Cibber

  Kings, Cheer, Mind

  Colley Cibber, “The Blind Boy”

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• I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!

  Robert Benchley

  Book, School, Class

  Robert Benchley (1976). “Chips Off the Old Benchley”, Amereon Limited

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• Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
  And I must think a little of the past:
  When I was ten I told a stinking lie
  That got a black boy whipped.

  Allen Tate

  Christmas, Lying, Love You

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.103, Macmillan

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• My darling boy whom I shall never know,
  My son, I love you in my deepest fears.

  Allen Tate

  Love You, Son, Darling

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.142, Macmillan

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• Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus:
  For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.

  Allen Tate

  Country, Venus, Matter

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.159, Macmillan

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• Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.

  Nora Ephron

  Sex, Dirty, Men

  Nora Ephron (2012). “Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media”, p.150, Vintage

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• I'm not making light of prayers here, but of so-called school prayer, which bears as much resemblance to real spiritual experienceas that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. From what I remember of praying in school, it was almost an insult to God, a rote exercise in moving your mouth while daydreaming or checking out the cutest boy in the seventh grade that was a far, far cry from soul-searching.

  Anna Quindlen

  Spiritual, Prayer, Nice

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• Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
  Whatever they are.

  Philip Larkin

  Girl, Dream, Women

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.162, Faber & Faber

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• Of Ickworth's boys, their father's joys,
  There is but one a bad one;
  The tenth is he, the parson's fee,
  And indeed he is a sad one.
  No love of fame, no sense of shame,
  And a bad heart, let me tell ye:
  Without, all brass; within, all ass,
  And the puppy's name is Felly.

  Horace Walpole

  Father, Heart, Names

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• In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.

  Kent Nerburn

  Responsibility, Past, Men

  Kent Nerburn (2014). “Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love”, p.36, New World Library

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• Mothers tend to encourage their sons to run away and romp.... Mothers of little boys often complain that "There's no controlling him." "He's all over the place...." The complaints are tinged with more than a little pride at the boy's marvelous independence and masculine bravado. It's almost as though the mother enjoyed being overwhelmed by her spectacular conquering hero.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Running, Hero

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• The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Girl, Work, Hands

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”

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• ... our scholarships should be bestowed on those whose ability and earnestness in the primary department have been proved, and whose capacity for a higher education is fully shown. This is the best work women of wealth can do, and I hope in the future they will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions of dollars to institutions for boys, as they have done in the past.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sex, Past, Giving

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2016). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters & Diary (Abridged)”, p.232, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• Boys will be boys as long as there are no girls in the picture.

  Abraham Maslow

  Girl, God, Long

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• For little boys are rancorous
  When robbed of any myth,
  And spiteful and cantankerous
  To all their kin and kith.
  But little girls can draw conclusions
  And profit from their lost illusions.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Girl, Children, Littles

  Phyllis McGinley (1951). “A Short Walk from the Station”

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