Boys quotes
4.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside boys — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean."
"When Amos Moses was a boy his daddy would use him for alligator bait, tie a rope around his neck and throw him in the swamp."
"There's an old saying. Never send a boy to do a man's job, send a lady."
"I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout."
"I learned lots of dirty jokes very young. There was this girl who told me them. The gang I led went in for shoplifting and pulling girls' knickers down. Other boys' parents hated me."
"Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans"
"My way of communicating with God as a boy (and often even now) was through the lyrics of a song. . . . So I didn't have the problem some people do who say, "I don't know how to pray." I used the songs to communicate with God. . . . To me, songs were the telephone to heaven, and I tied up the line quite a bit."
"What if you lived your entire life completely without urgency? You went to classes, you ate your meals, on Saturday nights a boy you didn't love took you to the movies; now and then you actually had a conversation with someone. The rest of the time -the hours that weren't accounted for-you spent waiting for something to happen to you; when you were particularly desperate, you went out looking for it."
"America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive. My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."
"We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward. We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the "good boy" or "good girl"."
"I've been on planes flying through thunder storms when the pilot says, 'ladies and gentlemen, we tried to fly around it but we can't so it's going to be rough'.And when a pilot says it's going to be bad, it's going to be rough. And you say to youself, boy, I could have got the train."
"I love the whole makeup of men - that they never mature and are always just boys."
"There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths."
"I love dogs. I grew up with dogs in my family from the time that I was a little boy; we always had German Shepherds and Labradors. I get on very well with dogs, they trust me."
"But when he thought to complain about the burden of its weight, he remembered that, because he had the jacket, he had withstood the cold of the dawn. We have to be prepared for change, he thought, and he was grateful for the jacket's weight and warmth. The jacket had a purpose, and so did the boy."
"You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. You can lead a boy to college but you cannot make him think."
"Be patient with the boys - you are dealing with soul-stuff."
"Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water."
"When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."
"Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper."
