What Does It Mean To Stay Gold In The Outsiders

The Outsiders was written by a seventeen-year-old S.E Hinton while she was in high school, this is why the book is so honest and appealing to teenagers since the book is written for teenagers by a teenager.
Hinton was inspired the write the novel after she was disturbed by the violent clashes between teenage gangs in her high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Ponyboy Curtis is the 14-year-old narrator of the story, presenting only what he himself sees, hears, and feels was based on a mixture of Hinton herself and a friend that was attacked by a gang when he was walking home from school one afternoon.
She was tired of all the pointless violence the youths around her conducted without adults ever understanding what’s going on in their [the youths]

That’s gold. Keep it that way, it’s a good way to be.” (Chapter 12, page 216)
Staying gold is always seeing and feeling things like the first time, even if there had been something to spoil it the second time you had the experience.
Growing up people tend to lose their gold, losing sight of all the little things that made life greater. Overall staying gold means to never let go of that spark and magical way of seeing things like when you were a kid, no matter what life throws at you.
There are many novels made for teenagers about growing up, dealing with love and death, but there are few novels that touch the topic of not being afraid to change your life despite all the odds against you, and there are even fewer that talk about “staying gold”, talking about when you’re a kid everything’s new like dawn and when you get used to everything that it becomes day then you never feel the way you felt the first time you experienced it.
It is Hinton’s interruptions of these feeling and experiences that make it effective for teenagers and young adults, she gives them [teenagers and young adults] meaning to the feelings they cannot explain nor understand why they feel them. She treats her readers and characters like the intelligent and thoughtful beings they are rather than dumb kids most adult writers portray in the