Youth
Hans Ras was born in 1926 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as the third son of a family of four children. His father had a wholesale business in confectionery, and all the children had to help in the business. They were all supposed to go to junior high school for their secondary education, as was usual at the time. However, when the eldest was expelled from such a school for precociousness and sent to a higher-grade high school, the others followed in his footsteps.
After Hans Ras passed his school-leaving exams, the Second World War broke out and he went into hiding, while his brothers were sent off into forced labour in Germany. Even at that time he was interested in languages, in particular the Javanese and Arabic language. But his high school certificate did not give him admission to an arts course at a university.
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Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“A youth in apparel that glittered
Went to walk in a grim forest.
There he met an assassin”
—Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
“If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)