20th Birthday Quotes

For my 20th birthday in March, I'll buy myself a present for doing my best. A one way ticket to Tokyo. All I need is my guitar and a pack of cigarettes. ~ Ai Yazawa

Food is one of life's really great pleasures. My 20th birthday party was all about booze, my 30th birthday was about drugs, and now I realise that my 40s are about food. It's something you appreciate more and more as you get older. ~ Alex James

I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn't even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I'd found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged. ~ Emma Watson

It seems like the more you grow up the more you fear things. ~ Melanie Laurent

School teaches you what to do with the rest of your life. I already knew. ~ Avril Lavigne

I'd be a birthday cake! ~ Liam Payne

You will recognize, my boy, the first sign of old age: it is when you go out into the streets of London and realize for the first time how young the policemen look. ~ Seymour Hicks

I shall not grow conservative with age. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Birthday is a sacred-life celebration. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

She pushed the book toward them, and Harry and Ron read: The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Sorcerer's Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal. There have been many reports of the Sorcerer's Stone over the centuries, but the only Stone currently in existence belongs to Mr. Nicolas Flamel, the noted alchemist and opera lover. Mr. Flamel, who celebrated his six hundred and sixty-fifth birthday last year, enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife, Perenelle (six hundred and fifty-eight). ~ J.K. Rowling

Art is dead.
Art is dead.
Art is dead.
Art is dead.

Entertainers like to seem complicated
But we're not complicated
I can explain it pretty easily

Have you ever been to a birthday
Party for children?
And one of the children won't stop screaming
'Cause he's just a little
Attention attractor

When he grows up
To be a comic or actor
He'll be rewarded for never maturing
For never under-
Standing or learning

That every day
Can't be about him
There's other people
You selfish asshole

I must be psychotic
I must be demented
To think that I'm worthy
Of all this attention

Of all of this money, you worked really hard for
I slept in late while you worked at the drug store
My drug's attention, I am an addict
But I get paid to indulge in my habit
It's all an illusion, I'm wearing make-up, I'm
wearing make-up
Make-up, make-up, make-up, make...

Art is dead
So people think you're funny, how do we get those
people's money?
I said art is dead
We're rolling in dough, while Carlin rolls in his grave
His grave, his grave

The show has got a budget
The show has got a budget
And all the poor people way more deserving of the
money
Won't budge it

'Cause I wanted my name in lights
When I could have fed a family of four
For forty ~ Bo Burnham

One thing that was really dope for me was that my dad had a '78 Corvette, '78 or '76 Corvette all my life. It always needed to be fixed up. I remember it's just been sitting in the driveway for years, and I got it fixed from top to bottom for his birthday. ~ Sevyn Streeter

How much I wish I could tell you, Dad
How much you mean to me ...
But there are no words to say
How much I admire you ...
appreciate you ...
thank you for everything you've done.
love you
Actually, there are
I've just used them
How much I wish you
A happy, happy birthday Dad ~ John Walter Bratton

Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints. ~ Bobby McFerrin

The day of birth is a sacred day. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

After fifty, one ceases to digest. As someone once said, "I just ferment my food now." ~ Henry Green

That part of the press release about me asking your father's permission to marry you was true - well, partly true, anyway. I didn't ask permission - I knew you wouldn't like that, it's sexist. You're not your father's property. But I did see him before we left, to tell him I was going to propose to you this weekend, and ask for his blessing."
I was stunned. "Wait . . . is this what you meant when you said before we left that you'd talked to my parents?"
"Yes. I spoke to your mother, too, because she played an even bigger role in raising you. I thought it was the right thing to do. How do you think you got out of doing all those events - and birthday Cirque du Soleil with your grandmother - so easily? ~ Meg Cabot

Happy Birthday To Steph, You're a Hoe with Big Breasts, so take the Night off from Hooking ... If ya Smell what The Rock's cooking! ~ Dwayne Johnson

I was starting to hate my sixteenth birthday. A poufy white dress and a cake with roses made out of pink icing and awkward dancing with boys in awkward suits was starting to sound like a great alternative. Seriously. Sign my up, I wouldn't even complain. ~ Alyxandria Harvey

Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. ~ Douglass North

But then the Nazis arrested Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi too. They spent six weeks in prison. To get out, they gave the Nazis everything they possessed: real estate, bank accounts, bonds, dishes, silver. Then they left immediately, heading east. Russia swallowed them. My mother waited and prayed for word of them, but none came. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century. ~ Lawrence Summers

What is so often said about the solders of the 20th century is that they fought to make us free. Which is a wonderful sentiment and one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred of truth in that statement but, it's not true. It's not even close to true in fact it's the opposite of truth.

There's this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death's. That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths. We can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death's but we don't do it by pretending that they'd died to set us free because we are less free; far less free now then we were before these slaughters began. These people did not die to set us free. They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths created.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. Solders are paid killers, and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions. We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people. That to me is where ~ Stefan Molyneux

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon
millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It's time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let's remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. ~ Rene Denfeld

I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-presidential years, of all of the American presidents in the 20th century. ~ Roger Morris

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place. ~ Terence McKenna

The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there. ~ Edgar Mitchell

Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.

One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.

'I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. 'Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.' 'Maybe,' I thought, 'only one of them is real.'

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt draw ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you're a kid and you're in a classroom, anybody would die to be hanging out in London or having their sixteenth birthday in Japan. ~ Zac Farro

That might work," I said. "I'm good at faking it."
This led to a couple moments of uncomfortable silence from both of us.
"You didn't mean ... ?" Morelli asked.
"No. Of course not."
"Never?"
"Maybe once."
His eyes narrowed. "Once?"
"It's all that comes to mind. It was the time we were late for your Uncle Spud's birthday party."
"I remember that. That was great. You're telling me you faked it?"
"We were late! I couldn't concentrate. It seemed like the best way to go. ~ Janet Evanovich

Timeless
Days without rhythm
Without bottom or top
In the arms of my lover
Time seems to stop.
Days become months
Which flow into years
Love's hourglass measures
Just two kinds of tears.
The first kind is cheery,
It sweetens the cheek;
The other burns bleary
It's black and it's bleak.

This Sunday or Friday,
I'm not quite sure when,
I'm going to turn thirty,
Or twenty, or ten?
It'll be my love's birthday
Or was it just mine?
I doesn't much matter
There's plenty of wine.
Should she go to heaven,
I dread to know when,
I'll count every second
Till we meet again. ~ Beryl Dov

'Christian' used to be a throwaway word. People didn't used to use it much. People didn't start self-labeling or getting labeled Christian until the last part of the 20th century. Before that, you might identify as a Baptist, or a Southern Baptist or a Methodist. But there wasn't one identifier that put you in a fold with all the other believers. ~ Penn Jillette

I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say "Yeah," and to walk with a little dip in their hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like Christopher Columbus thought. ~ Hugh Masekela

...the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth - and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me. ~ Martin Scorsese

The sketch of the summer-house which she had given me on the morning of our farewell, and which had never been separated from me since, was the birthday of our first hope. ~ Wilkie Collins

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release. ~ Jackson Browne

I can sing 'Happy Birthday' to you in twelve different places, but one of them is going to make you feel a certain thing, maybe it's a vulnerability, maybe an innocence, maybe another way is sexy and soulful or bluesy whatever it is, but with singers, exploring keys, I think, is important. ~ Idina Menzel

Dear Hilde,
I assume you're still celebrating your 15th birthday. Or is it the morning after? Anyways, it makes no difference to your present. In a sense, that will last a life time. But I'd like to wish you happy birthday one more time. Perhaps you understand now why I send the cards to Sophie. I am sure she will pass them on to you.
P.S. Mom said you lost your wallet. I hereby promise to reimburse you the 150 crowns. You will probably be able to get another school I.D. before they close for the summer vacation.
Love from Dad. ~ Jostein Gaarder

What is Aldous capable of?"
"Aldous is two thousands years old. He's capable of anything."
"Aldous Nix is two thousands years old?"
"So, I've heard. He doesn't invite me to his birthday parties. ~ Cassandra Clare

Happy birthday coz, you are the very best, I send this card, with lots and lots, of hugs, kisses and love ~ Susan Smith

I dreamt that I took William Burrough's penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, 'You're not a hero. You're not a hero. You're not. You're not. You're not.' "
"How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?"
…"I guess I'm nervous about my birthday. ~ Sarah Schulman

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

St. Clair tucks the tips of his fingers into his pockets and kicks the cobblestones with the toe of his boots. "Well?" he finally asks.
"Thank you." I'm stunned. "It was really sweet of you to bring me here."
"Ah,well." He straightens up and shrugs-that full-bodied French shrug he does so well-and reassumes his usual, assured state of being. "Have to start somewhere. Now make a wish."
"Huh?" I have such a way with words. I should write epic poetry or jingles for cat food commercials.
He smiles. "Place your feet on the star, and make a wish."
"Oh.Okay,sure." I slide my feet together so I'm standing in the center. "I wish-"
"Don't say it aloud!" St. Clair rushes forward, as if to stop my words with his body,and my stomach flips violently. "Don't you know anything about making wishes? You only get a limited number in life. Falling stars, eyelashes,dandelions-"
"Birthday candles."
He ignores the dig. "Exactly. So you ought to take advantage of them when they arise,and superstition says if you make a wish on that star, it'll come true." He pauses before continuing. "Which is better than the other one I've heard."
"That I'll die a painful death of poisoning, shooting,beating, and drowning?"
"Hypothermia,not drowning." St. Clair laughs. He has a wonderful, boyish laugh. "But no. I've heard anyone who stands here is destined to return to Paris someday. And as I understand it,one year for you is one year to many. Am I right?"
I cl ~ Stephanie Perkins