Whatever you are doing, put your whole mind on it. If you are shooting, your mind should be only on the target. Then you will never miss. If you are learning your lessons, think only of the lesson. In India boys and girls are taught to do this.
But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
There were lots of little boys having their bar mitzvahs all over the world, and they sent me tapes of some of them that they interviewed, probably six or seven little boys, and there was something about Mendel. I just loved his little face. I loved the energy of Mendel.
Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on a corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his mouth twisted and broken... I couldn't get Emmett Till out of my mind, until one evening I thought of a way to get back at white people for his death.
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they're got one, and you beg for the core, and remind them how you give them a core one time, they take a mouth at you, and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't a-going to be no core.
Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood
As a boy, I once saw a cart of melons that sorely tempted me. I sneaked up to the cart and stole a melon. I went into the alley to devour it, but no sooner had I set my teeth into it, than I paused, a strange feeling coming over me. I came to a quick conclusion. Firmly, I walked up to that cart, replaced the melon - and took a ripe one.
From high Meonia's rocky shores I came, Of poor decsent, Acoetes is my name, My sire was measly born: no oxen ploughed, His fruitful fields, nor in his pastures lowed, His whole estate within the waters lay' With lines and hooks he caught the finny prey; His art was all his livelehood, which he Thus with his dying lips bequeathed to me: In streams, my boy, and rivers take thy chance; There swims', said he, Thy whole inheritance.
There is only one sin and it is: weakness. When I was a boy, I read Milton's Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that person who never weakens, faces everything, and determines die game.
You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since-on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with.