Boyhood Quotes

“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“When you're a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don't want to know.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“There is so much woman in many a girl and too much boy in many a man.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession...”
― R. M. Ballantyne

“I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim’s got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he’s richer?”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“The echo of two boys playing in a pool testing each other to see who could hold their breath the longest.

… Whadda ya wanna do now?— I know, we could wrestle like the Roman gladiators— Okay— What do we fight for?— Loser has to do the victor’s homework for a week— Nah, raise the stakes. Loser has to suck the victor’s johnny— Trenton recalled the long ago memory of two boys wrestling, butt naked in the back yard and the battle went on forever locked in each other’s grip. A stalemate tangle in each other’s arm. And they kissed finding each other’s tongue. The taste of it so good and frightening at the same time and they pulled apart fearfully— Deez— Yeah Trent— I don’t think we should tell anyone about this, okay? — Yeah okay—”
― Talon P.S., Becoming His Slave

“Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you with overpowering aversion for a person who, however, deserves your respect, yet whose hair, his neck, the way he walks, the sound of his voice, his whole person, his every gesture are repulsive to you, and at the same time some unaccountable force draws you to him and compels you to follow his slightest acts with uneasy attention.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

“I do believe our culture is doing a bad job raising boys. The evidence is in the shocking violence of Paducah, Jonesboro, Cheyenne, and Edinboro. It's in our overcrowded prisons and domestic violence shelters. It's in our Ritalin-controlled elementary schools and alcohol-soaked college campuses.”
― Mary Pipher, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood

“I endeavor to recall the happy comforting dreams interrupted by my returning to consciousness of reality, but to my astonishment so soon as I recapture the thread of my former reverie I find it impossible to go on with it and, most astonishing of all, my imaginings no longer afford me any pleasure.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

“If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I’ve strived to be a lion
all my life
because they tell me boys
are made of fangs and blood
but maybe there is
more to us and we
are wolves with
greater patience for
long hunts at night.”
― Ben Ditmars, Moments at Midnight: A Poetry Collaboration

“Boyhood still often seems the time he was most real to himself and most wise, as if every habit acquired since is merely fancy dress.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“Charlie scratched inside his left ear. Everybody. The first war in history where everybody won. I can't figure it. So long." He went on up the sidewalk, crossed the front yard, opened the door of his house, waved, and was gone.

"There goes Charlie," said Douglas.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“It´s a funny thing about girls. Every time you mention some guy is strictly a bastard – very mean, or very conceited and all – and when you mention it to the girl, she´ll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn´t keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion. Girls. You never know what they´re going to think.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Each time I offered boyhood, you rejected it. It was simple and easy for you. But for our culture, it was radical.
What I was just beginning to understand in a blurry intuitive way, a series of sketches, watercolors without edges, is that you are dangerous.
Of course, you're just being. You're not doing anything. But from my viewpoint, I see how it can appear, which is something like this: By rejecting boyhood and therefore
manhood, you have rejected the patriarchy. It's like someone who's been offered an endless feast of power, an all-you-can-eat buffet of privilege, and you've said, blithely,
"No thanks." Some may see it as turning your nose up at the great gift of power. By claiming girlhood, you've upended what our culture values most: men, manliness,
prowess, strength, dominance. How dare you?”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“If I understand two things about masculinity at the age of seven, it is a) the Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia, and b) the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls. Nobody wants to be a gay and only gays play with girls – this much has been made clear.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“My smells of a son are gummy sweeties, Play-Doh, Pritt Stick, poster paint and wax crayons. Earthy mud on polyester football kit. The sweet antiseptic of sticking plasters. Fruity bubble gum and the minty tang of chong- as he and his friends called chewing gum. Bicycle chain oil and rubber inner tubes. The chemical overload of Lynx sprayed profusely over sweat, hair gel and toxic trainers. Fried onions and meat on the breath. Tomato ketchup.


My scents for a son are:

I am Juicy Couture by Juicy Couture
Black by Bvlgari
L'Air de Rien by Miller Harris
Serge Noire by Serge Lutens
Rocker Femme by Britney Spears
Dirty by Lush
Africa by Lynx”
― Maggie Alderson, The Scent of You

“Whatever was said or done, I knew what I wanted; and that was to be a boy among the boys.”
― George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

“The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection they must prove themselves invulnerable, button down warriors in the world's emotional market place.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Stepping into worlds for which I am the first to see, and meeting the characters who live there, is a joy unlike anything else I’ve experienced. As a writer I attempt to share this joy with an invitation to others. Thanks to those who have accepted the invitation. E. G. Kardos”
― E.G. Kardos, Cutting of Harp Strings: A Novel

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system….
They ought to practise leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…”
― R. M. Ballanytne

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system….
They ought to practise leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…”
― R. M. Ballantyne

“Why would teenage boys go out on a boat in a storm?” Stacey wondered. “Well, now that I say it aloud, it kinda answers itself.”
― J.L. Bryan, The Trailwalker

“Bravo, Amir. You're a good son.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner: Graphic Novel

“I think I can say that effeminate homosexuals are among those who indulge least in sex acts with other boys at school. They seem to realize that these jolly get-togethers are really only a pooling of the carnal feelings of two people who deep down are interested in their dreams of girls. Otherwise they tend to be self-congratulatory pyrotechnical displays of potency.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Instead of raising happy healthy boys to build things and innovate we are diagnosing them as a problem.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“The boy in me still carries the memories of those days when I lifted crab pots out of the Colleton River before dawn, when I was shaped by life on the river, part child, part sacristan of tides.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides