You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want.
You know what the crummiest feeling you can have is? To hate the person you love the best in the world.
When you're a kid, everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be.
We had played a kid's version of gang fighting called Civil War, and then later we had got in on the real thing, we fought with chains and we fought barefisted and we fought Socs and we fought other g...
They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.
That's why people don't ever think to blame the Socs and are always ready to jump on us. We look hoody and they look decent. It could be just the other way around - half of the hoods I know are pretty...
Johnny almost grinned as he nodded. Tuff enough, he managed, and by the way his eyes were glowing, I figured Southern gentlemen had nothing on Johnny Cade.
It would be a miracle if Dally loved anything. The fight for self-preservation had hardened him beyond caring.
In our neighborhood it’s rare to find a kid who doesn’t drink once in a while. But Soda never touches a drop—he doesn’t need to. He gets drunk on just plain living.
I've been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everyth...
I could never understand people being scared of things they didn't know nothing about.
But it still hurt anyway. You know a guy a long time, and I mean really know him, you don’t get used to the idea that he’s dead just overnight. Johnny was something more than a buddy to all of us. I g...
The person in this picture is really me.
You oughta see Kathy's brother. Now there's a hood. He's so greasy he glides when he walks. He goes to the barber for an oil change, not a haircut.
You can't say, 'This is just a stage' when its important to people what they're feeling. Maybe he'll outgrow it someday but right now it's important.
Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too. Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the thi...
Things are rough all over.
The difference is that was then, this is now.
That's why we're separated, I said. It's not money, it's feeling--you don't feel anything and we feel too violently.
That was the first time I realized the extent of Johnny's hero-worship for Dally Winston. Of all of us, Dally was the one I liked least. He didn't have Soda's understanding or dash, or Two-Bit's humor...