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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.

— John Steinbeck The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

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Youth

More quotes by John Steinbeck

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Journal of a Novel (1969)

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone.

East of Eden (1952)

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess.

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.

East of Eden (1952)

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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

J. M. Barrie Peter Pan (1904)

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Euripides

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Steinbeck (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.