Younger Self Quotes

1. "By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, "There is no hurry. We shall get there some day." But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late."
Author: A.A. Milne

2. "Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean.""Yes, yes, I know. Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.""Why?""Because the train gets to its journey's end at last, and there is a proverb about that in your language, Mademoiselle.""'Journey's end in lovers meeting.'" Lenox laughed. "That is not going to be true for me.""Yes--yes, it is true. You are young, younger than you yourself know. Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it."The whistle of the engine came again."Trust the train, Mademoiselle," murmured Poirot again. "And trust Hercule Poirot. He knows."
Author: Agatha Christie

3. "I am not a prisoner of my sexuality like men younger than myself although I write about being a prisoner."
Author: Al Goldstein

4. "I didn't moisturise when I was younger, but when I got to 27 I decided to start slathering myself in oil, and now I'm obsessed with moisturising."
Author: Alexa Chung

5. "I'm so happy that I finished college. Going into this crazy vortex of scrutiny is tough. If I was younger than I was now and I was going to fashion shows, I might have this distorted sense of self. I might rely on those cameras. Because when I was 18, I was half-baked."
Author: Allison Williams

6. "At the end of the week, you told me that you were going on a long trip, but someday you would come back and marry me."Arianna giggled. "Did I really say that?" she asked, mortified at her bold younger self."Yes, but I suppose it doesn't count if you don't remember. Oh yeah, not to mention the fact you told two of the butlers, three maids, and your favorite cook you wanted to marry them also"
Author: B. Kristin McMichael

7. "Desert heat or not, the idea that my younger self was facing her last moments was a bucket of cold water in the face. I didn't like her, but she appeared to have her shit together in a way I hadn't for a long time, and she had, frankly, deserved better than me. I tried to wet my lips, had nothing to do it with and croaked, "Sorry." "Don't be sorry. Be good. Be right. Be a hero."
Author: C.E. Murphy

8. "I think what I would say to my younger self, and probably to younger, just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there, and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something, to push yourself to do those things."
Author: Carol Leifer

9. "Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."
Author: Cornelia Funke

10. "In my younger years my dedication may have expressed itself egotistically."
Author: Cyril Cusack

11. "It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self."
Author: David Foster Wallace

12. "Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete."
Author: David Foster Wallace

13. "I have lots of brothers and sisters, two of whom are younger than myself, so I rely on my phone, text messaging or e-mailing to stay in the loop and communicate when I'm away for big chunks of time."
Author: Devon Aoki

14. "I am charging you with the protection of my mother and friends, not to mention keeping my younger self off the Internet. He is as dangerous as Opal."
Author: Eoin Colfer

15. "I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will)."
Author: Eric McCormack

16. "I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for 'The Spectator.'"
Author: Gary Kemp

17. "Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, 'You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I daresay you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn't believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine."
Author: George Eliot

18. "In a recent issue of Parade Magazine when asked for "Advice for a Younger You," Glenn Close responded: "I'd tell myself to listen to my heart. Listen to that little voice that says, 'Mmm, I don't think so.' Because when you override that, you basically override who you are."
Author: Glenn Close

19. "Let us educate the younger generation to be shy in and out of season: to edge behind the furniture: to say spasmodic and ill-digested things: to twist their feet round the protective feet of sofas and armchairs: to feel that their hands belong to someone else--that they are objects, which they long to put down on some table away from themselves.For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop into natural shapes. Without this fluid the character becomes merely standardized or imitative: it is within the tender velvet sheath of shyness that the full flower of idiosyncrasy is nurtured: it is from this sheath alone that it can eventually unfold itself, coloured and undamaged. Let the shy understand, therefore, that their disability is not only an inconvenience, but also a privilege. Let them regard their shyness as a gift rather than as an affliction. Let them consider how intolerable are those of their contemporaries who are not also shy."
Author: Harold Nicolson

20. "She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self."
Author: Harriet Evans

21. "For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately."
Author: J.D. Salinger

22. "I don't cast somebody that I think is like my younger self."
Author: James Franco

23. "Daemon was sprawled on his back, one arm stretched across the space beside him and the other rested across his bare stomach. Sheets were twisted around his narrow hips. His face was almost angelic in sleep, chiselled lines softened and lips relaxed. Thick lashes fanned the top of his cheeks. He looked so much younger at rest but, in a weird way, he was even more out of my league. His kind of masculine beauty was otherworldly and intimidating. Something that existed in between the pages of the books I read. Sometimes I had a hard time convincing myself he was real."
Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

24. "You really miss him don't you?"The Ranger nodded. "More than I realized," he said. Alyss urged her horse close beside his and learned over to kiss him on the cheek.That's for Will when you see him." A ghost of a smile touched Halt's face.You'll understand if I don't pass it on in person?" he said. Alyss smiled and leaned over and kissed him again.And that's for you, you jaded, bad-tempered old Ranger."A little surprised by her own impulsivness, she urged her horse ahead of him. Halt touched his cheek and looked at the slim blonde figure.If I were twenty years younger...he began.The he sighed and had to be honest with himself. Make that thirty years, he thought."
Author: John Flanagan

25. "This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good."
Author: Kim Edwards

26. "If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "Don't be special." That's what I would say to my younger self if I could pinpoint the moment when I went astray. But there was no one moment. I was always astray"
Author: Leila Sales

28. "Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate."
Author: Lionel Shriver

29. "A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?"
Author: Lorrie Moore

30. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

31. "A few hours later, Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing pain, to comb that beautiful hair, which was only slightly graying and had thus far seemed much younger than my grandmother herself. But this was now reversed: the hair was the only feature to set the crown of age on a face grown young again, free of the wrinkles, the shrinkage, the puffiness, the tensions, the sagging flesh which pain had brought to it for so long. As in the distant days when her parents had chosen a husband for her, her features were delicately traced by purity and submission, her cheeks glowed with a chaste expectation, a dream of happiness, an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. As it ebbed from her, life had borne away its disillusions. A smile seemed to hover on my grandmother's lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl."
Author: Marcel Proust

32. "...eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a starBoth intimate and ultimate, And you will be heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisperOh let me, for a while longer, enter the twoBeautiful bodies of your lungs...Look, and look again.This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.It's more than bones.It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.It's more than the beating of a single heart.It's praising.It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.You have a life- just imagine that!You have this day, and maybe another, and maybeStill another…And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger.And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world. "
Author: Mary Oliver

33. "This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say."
Author: Maryrose Wood

34. "I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he'd planned it that way. I couldn't quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn't tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I'd expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I'd expected to feel more like one single person."
Author: Michael Cunningham

35. "I'd probably say to my younger self, get yourself a whole collection of lawyers. Which is what I have now."
Author: Mike Oldfield

36. "In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions. For instance, it occurred to her that other women (those who weren't anxious) were more attractive and more seductive, and that the young man, who did not conceal the fact that he knew this kind of woman well, would someday leave her for a woman like that. (True, the young man declared that he'd had enough of them to last his whole life, but she knew that he was still much younger than he thought.) She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person."
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "I was really shy when I was younger, so my mom got me into an acting class to see if I would open myself up more in front of an audience. Her plan was for me to just talk more."
Author: Moises Arias

38. "I'm accepting I'm not living that younger, dreamed version of myself in the big city."
Author: Paula Cole

39. "I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it."
Author: Richard Eyre

40. "I'm younger than I once was. Internally. Less self-conscious. Less insecure."
Author: Richard Gere

41. "His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching."
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

42. "The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine."
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

43. "Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees."
Author: Ron Suskind

44. "Okay, this is going to be confusing, kid.-Amelia Pond to her younger self in the pandora box"
Author: Stephen Moffat

45. "Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

46. "Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us."
Author: Sydney J. Harris

47. "All love may begin by being passionate, especially for younger people. But in the process of living together, they have to learn and practice love, so that selfishness--the tendency to possess--will diminsh, and the elemetns of understanding and gratitude will settle in, little by little, until their love becomes nourishing, protecting, and reassuring," (41)."
Author: Thích Nhất Hạnh

48. "When younger, I was thin as a rail. As I've grown older, I've put on weight. I have continued to love myself in all those roles. Part of my spirituality, I always tell people, is to accept yourself for who you are."
Author: Troy Perry

49. "The younger, certainly, had to the full that charmof a constitutional freshness of aspect which maydefy for a long time extravagant or erring habits oflife; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, andfirm, which seemed unassociable with any form ofself-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle ofsome young hound or roe, such as human beingsinvariably like to stroke—with all the goodliness, thatis, of the finer sort of animalism, though still whollyanimal. It was the charm of the blond head, theunshrinking gaze, the warm tints:—neither morenor less than one may see every English summer, inyouth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it whichmakes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinshipit seems to have with playthings and gay flowers."
Author: Walter Pater

50. "Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Younger Self Quotes Pictures