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.
“One of my teachers inspired me to go to community college first and that decision shaped my entire life. She gave me so many life lesson and tips and we still keep in touch today!”
“[As women and Hispanics] I think we will have to work harder to prove yourself, but you are not just – you are more than a housewife. You are more than someone that cleans a home or whatever. Just seeing the way people treat their wife, treat their daughters.”
“Gaining and declining.”
“This is funny but yeah because they feel like the reason they are struggling in life is because they didn’t go to school! They really regretted.”
“I guess psychologist just because of the compassion behind it. I have a friend who is seeking to be a clinical psychologist, but other than that not really.”
“Financial stability, retirement, dream job, fulfillment, flexible schedule, corporate retreats…Yeah. When you, in my business, when you’re in your career, you’re in a certain threshold the way you can be able to create your own schedule. And so I’m just like, you know, if it’s Thursday and it’s beautiful outside, I got to just call my secretary, and I’m gone for Thursday and Friday. I’ll see you guys on Monday. Just email me for any updates or any last-minute changes. So that’s what I mean by flexible scheduling. You in a safe threshold with your career where you kind of can create your own…or schedule, as long as you handle your main goals and priorities and…you know. We all don’t like to punch the clock all the time or feel like, damn, if I be late one more time, they going to write me up like for 160…being wrote up. You know, just those, I don’t know, smaller things that I think that you, that can piss you off about the little smaller…”
“So my end goal is a chemical engineering job for a car company.”
“[A career] takes a lot of thinking on what you actually want to do.”
“I just wrote down, wrote down male, Black, non-religious.”
“I think YouTubers in general, you can kind of say that is your dream job because they get to do what they love and make money…and make people laugh.”