Welcome to the Striving to Thriving Youth Quote Library. Here you’ll find a curated collection of more than 5,700 quotes from young people ages 15-22 living in communities across the United States. In the library you can see how young people describe their multifaceted identities, how they understand and apply meaning to language around job, work and career, how they think about and assign value to relationships, networking and connections, and their future goals and the education and career choices they believe will lead them there. You can also view additional notes on curation, categories and filters.
“Someone who gives you strength and someone to guide you; it is not someone to make decisions for you. It is someone to guide you in the right direction and push you to do the things you want to do that you may not want to do.”
“Setting my goals because usually I don’t say oh I want to go do this. So saying my goals out load and the steps that I want to take to get there, it is getting me more motivation, determination to actually go and do it. [What’s motivating is] hearing what it takes to get there. It is a lot of hard work, and I know I am going to go through some bumps and stress and everything. I am not afraid of it because at the end I know it is going to be satisfied with what I’m doing. At the end I will look back at it and feel more proud and accomplished because I got through all of it.”
“I only got two things down. I said serve and protect, like not police-wise, but like as a like, you know, like not as police-wise, but as in like, but for like the gender. I said serve and protect, because like as males, like I felt like we was put on this earth to like serve and protect as in like, for example, like because we was like husbands to our wives and like stuff like that, and like we was supposed to be like in the household to serve and protect. So like as you like go to work, come home, like the breadwinner, so like, and then I only…like when I said protect, like protect our households as men. And so for the race, I put strong, because like I feel like, you know, like I’m just keeping real. Like us Black, us being, us like us being Black, like we all just, I mean, I feel like we strong, like we the strong. Like out of every other thing, like we are strong. Like every, I don’t know, like everything we do, we’re strong, so that’s how I look at it. That’s the only thing is two things I got.”
“Gaining advanced skills towards a future career. The ability to be independent and be in charge of your choices.”
“Like, and my mom like what my mom does like, even though that’s not a part of her job description how like she still steps outside of her like job description and go above and beyond for people. I don’t think, I wouldn’t mind having, I wouldn’t being an insurance agent.”
“I believe it affords me more opportunities, just as it always has, but I do feel like in the literary world, specifically, there is currently a slight disadvantage when applying for grants, awards, fellowships, etc.”
“I look at work more like what you have to do to get the job: effort, determination.”
“For mine I also said like being passionate. I said like something you love to do because like nowadays I feel like that’s a really big thing. Like no matter how much get you paid, like you should want to do it.”
“Dark.”
[On career v. job v. work] “Well, on my paper, really, there’s like, if I put both of these together it’ll form a career. Like I put time, life, job, don’t give up, and don’t…lifelong goal to do after this like, basically, telling yourself to, I kind of lost the words right now. I’m sorry.”