Birthday Parties Quotes

I am the guy dressing up in, you know, the caveman outfit for the kids' birthday parties. ~ Rob Lowe

Find a number of educational as well as fun places for kids to make the long, boring days of vacations full of adventure and fun with Sacramento4kids. ~ Sacramento4Kids

Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They're one of those things where you're forced to be happy. And even if you're totally depressed, you're got to pretend you're glad you were born, regardless of the fact that getting older means you're closer to dying. ~ A.M. Homes

Muslim Girlhood

I never found myself in a pink aisle.
There was no box for me
with glossy cellophane like heat
and a neat packet of instructions in six languages.

Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed.
I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the other - no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and punctual resolution waiting.

I took tests in which Jane & William had so many apples.

I fasted through birthday parties
and Christmas parties
and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables,
picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain.

I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue.
I hungered for Jell-O & Starburts & margarine;
could read mono- and diglycerides by five,
knew what gelatin meant, and
where it came from. ~ Leila Chatti

I believe that at least 70 percent of parenting goes to the mother. In our house, I'm the one who knows about all the school stuff, helps with the homework, organizes the play dates, and remembers the birthday parties. ~ Cindy Crawford

I grew up doing all that stuff because I was obsessed with the '50s. I had sock hops for birthday parties. So I've always done The Twist and stuff. It was pretty natural and, with my parents doing it all the time, I'd just copy them. Not very pretty. ~ Brittany Snow

Remember that, Iz. Be a kid of honesty. Wave it like a banner for all to see. Also, while I'm thinking about it - be a kid who loves surprises. Squeal with delight over puppies and cupcakes and birthday parties. Be curious, but content. Be loyal, but independent. Be kind. To everyone. Treat every day like you're making waffles. Don't settle for the first guy (or girl) unless he's the right guy (or girl). Live your effing life. Do so with gusto, because my God, there's nothing sorrier than a gusto-less existence. Know yourself. Love yourself. Be a good friend. Be a kid of hope and substance. Be a kid of appetite, Iz. You know what I mean, don't you? (Of course you do. You're a Malone.) Okay, that's all for now. Catch you on the flip side.
Blimey, get ready.
Signing off,
Mary Iris Malone,
Your Big Sister ~ David Arnold

I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they've had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be - and not only you, but virtually the entire family - if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past - I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it's the one that most appeals to their imaginations - and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it's impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes ~ Herman Koch

My grandfather so throughly considered cooking to be "women's work" that he wouldn't even enter the kitchen to get his own glass of water. My husband, born sixty-one years after my grandfather, shows his love by bringing me coffee every morning and whipping up chocolate-chip cookies for friends' birthday parties. I think it's fair to say that few young men these days feel less masculine for knowing their way around a kitchen. ~ Emily Matchar

Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright - that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I get uncomfortable when people give me presents and watch me open them. I don't have birthday parties, because the idea of a group of people singing and looking at me while I'm blowing out candles gives me hives. ~ Brit Marling

I'm not into sugar for kids, but you don't want your kid to be the carrot kid. There's always the kid at the birthday parties carrying a bag of carrots. You've got to let them eat a little cake. ~ Tobey Maguire

Birthday parties and events will be thrown for the child to elicit admiration and attention from others. However, the child will be punished, berated and humiliated in the middle of the party in front of an audience if they behave against the expectations of the self-absorbed mother. The party only serves to generate additional narcissistic supply for the mother, not a pleasurable event for the child. Events are scheduled, changed, and cancelled in order to exert and announce control over the child. They make it very apparent to the child that the mother can both give pleasure and take pleasure away by these means. ~ J.B. Snow

I have 'Happy Birthday' in multiple languages on my iPod - I like to play it at company birthday parties. ~ Yigal Azrouel

In many schools, teachers have been told, falsely, that there is an "opportunity zone" in which a child's gender identification is malleable. They have used this zone to try to stamp out boyhood: banning same-sex play groups and birthday parties, forcing children to do gender-atypical activities, suspending boys who run during recess or play cops and robbers. In her book the War Against Boys, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers rightly calls this agenda "meddlesome, abusive and quite beyond what educators in a free society are mandated to do(172). ~ Steven Pinker

I could rent Caesar out at birthday parties. Halloween parties. I could take pictures of Caesar eating a piece of birthday cake. Or a picture of a kid riding Caesar on his birthday. We could build a saddle. ~ Pat Conroy

I love you, Tess McGee. I don't do big funny or heartfelt speeches in front of people at birthday parties, but I'm excellent in private alcoves in beer gardens." He paused. "Okay, that sounded really bad, what I mean is ... "
I kissed him into silence. I pressed my forehead against his with a sigh. "I love you, too, Toby. In fact, that's what I was going to tell you before we walked into the beer garden. Right before the really bad singing started."
Toby chuckled. He let out a sigh of relief. "Ready to reminisce?"
I whispered my final word before he closed the distance.
"Always. ~ C.J. Duggan

I would always say I'm doing a video project. About dancing or birthday parties. Of course, the video becomes more than that. It goes deeper than that. But it's not a lie. It's a starting point. ~ Laurel Nakadate

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition. ~ Thelonious Monk

What we, and others, often fail to realise is the depth and reach of our loss: that not only will we never have children, but we will never create our own family. We will never watch them grow up, never throw children's birthday parties, never take that 'first day at school' photo, never teach them to ride a bike. We'll never see them graduate, never see them possibly get married and have their own children. We'll never get a chance to heal the wounds of our own childhood by doing things differently with our children. We'll never be grandmothers and never give the gift of grandchildren to our parents. We'll never be the mother of our partner's children and hold that precious place in their heart. We'll never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our siblings and watch our children play together. We'll never be part of the community of mothers, never be considered a 'real' woman. And when we die, there is no one to leave our stuff to, and no one to take our lifetime's learnings into the next generation.

If you take the time to think about it all in one go, which is more than most of us are ever likely to do because of the breathtaking amount of pain involved, it's a testament to our strength that we're still standing at all. ~ Jody Day

Shouldn't be having a birthday party two weeks after your birthday ... Okay, three days, no more than that though, it's not your birthday anymore! There's gotta be a time, there's gotta be a cutoff point where you can't have birthday parties. You're so desperate for a party that you have to have a party two weeks after? Wait till next year, you missed it! ~ Larry David

For a very long time I worked and worked and worked, and then I looked up one day and all my friends were married with children. These married-with-children people were still my friends, but they'd become part of a community I wasn't in, a club I didn't belong to. Socially, their lives had completely changed, and they were busy. Their attention had turned to carpools and birthday parties and school tuition, and I was playing catch-up:"Wait, so we don't have game night anymore? You guys, who's free for dinner Saturday? Oh, absolutely no one? ~ Lauren Graham

In 1991, Disney forced a group of New Zealand parents in a remote country town to remove their amateur renditions of Pluto and Donald Duck from a playground mural; and Barney has been breaking up children's birthday parties across the U.S., claiming that any parent caught dressed in a purple dinosaur suit is violating its trademark. The Lyons Group, which owns the Barney character, "has sent 1,000 letters to shop owners" renting or selling the offending costumes. "They can have a dinosaur costume. It's when it's a purple dinosaur that it's illegal, and it doesn't matter what shade of purple, either," says Susan Elsner Furman, Lyons' spokesperson. ~ Naomi Klein

The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa's every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as "tact" would get shot down with "Mom, that's lying!" And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, "Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don't really like it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Even though I believe birthday parties should be given, not taken, I wish someone would take all of mine and hide them on the other side of eternity. ~ Jarod Kintz

Something dangerous is beginning:
I am coming late to my own self.
I made an appointment with my thoughts-
the thoughts were snatched from me.
I made an appointment with Faulkner-
but they made me go to a banquet.
I made an appointment with history,
but a grass-widow dragged me into bed.
Worse than barbed wire
are birthday parties, mine and others',
and roasted suckling pigs hold me
like a sprig of parsley between their teeth!
Led away for good
to a life absolutely not my own,
everything that I eat, eats me,
everything that I drink, drinks me.
I made an appointment with myself,
but they invite me to feast on my own spareribs.
I am garlanded from all sides
not by strings of bagels, but by the holes of bagels,
and I look like an anthology of zeros.
Life gets broken into hundreds of lifelets,
that exhaust and execute me.
In order to get through to myself
I had to smash my body against others',
and my fragments, my smithereens,
are trampled by the roaring crowd.
I am trying to glue myself together,
but my arms are still severed.
I'd write with my left leg,
but both the left and the right
have run off, in different directions.
I don't know- where is my body?
And soul? Did it really fly off,
without a murmured 'good-bye! '?
How do I break through to a faraway namesake,
waiting for me in the cold somewhere ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

She's drawn to me just as I'm drawn to her. She can't keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She's risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.
And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she's not just a candle. She's a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We're both the same.
That's the secret.
What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.
What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.
What sufis veil in verse.
I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.
I'm hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don't even know if I am or what I'm doing.
I just say it.
"I love you."
And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, somet ~ Mohsin Hamid

How about it, kids?" he said before we left for the game. "I could rent Caesar out at birthday parties. Halloween parties. I could take pictures of Caesar eating a piece of birthday cake. Or a picture of a kid riding Caesar on his birthday. We could build a saddle." "Caesar doesn't eat cake," Luke said. "He likes kids, though. We could take pictures of Caesar eating a kid at his last birthday party. Then we could take pictures of the hysterical mother trying to pull the tiger off her only child. Then we could take pictures of Caesar devouring the mother," I said. ~ Pat Conroy

That's why I have birthday parties - to celebrate making it through another twelve months of dealing with assholes and not killing any of them. I ~ Emma Hart

Other people's children's birthday parties are the most joyful events you will ever resent having to attend. ~ Jim Gaffigan

With my daughter, we do arts and crafts, we read a lot, we listen to music, and we cut the strings off balloons and bounce them around after birthday parties. ~ Lisa Loeb

Whenever I hear about parents who have nine or ten children, the only thing I wonder is how they survive the birthday parties. ~ George Carlin

I know that the smallest, most inconsequential things can set me off: a well-meaning friend or family member who says, "Come on, just this once." Off-limit foods served at special occasions like birthday parties, weddings, and holidays. A perceived insult, a bad day, or lousy weather. If there has been an excuse to eat, I have used it to always find my way to food - and the price I paid was staying fat. Those days are over. ~ Tory Johnson

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings. ~ Shakira

So I've gotten used to not complaining, and I've gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I've gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don't miss friends' birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I've never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I'd go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. I've done every school project pretty much by myself. When Mom or Dad ask me how things are going in school, I've always said "good" - even when it hasn't always been so good. My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through. This isn't me being noble, by the way: it's just the way I know it is. ~ R.J. Palacio

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

The problem now is (that) the foods of poor quality are the ones coming in from home from teachers and staff, used for birthday parties and for things like booster sales. ~ Robert E. Murray

I hate birthdays. I hate birthday parties. I hate them. I don't know what it is, anybody's only got to come wafting near me with a piece of cake with a candle on and I break out in hives. ~ Cat Deeley

Be helpful after you think, be smart before you create your own personality and be thoughtful after making friends. ~ Fahmid Hassan Prohor

And I was very shy as a kid; if you sang me 'Happy Birthday,' I would cry. Quite shy. So the idea of being an actor, much less a model, was just out of this world. ~ Cody Horn

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 kissed this girl
but her tongue didn't move right
and then she went home.

Before
I got her number and I saved it on my telephone
but I did it in the wrong alphabet.
so I wrote down all of the possible
permutations in order to decode
her name so that I would know it
if we ever kissed again. ~ Keith Birthday

An interview is only as good as both parties are willing to give to the interview and that includes the interviewer. ~ Jay Duplass

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists. ~ Eva Zeisel

Count Chojnicki was curious. No other passion than curiosity sent him out into the world, drew him to the tables of the great gaming halls, sequestered him behind the walls of his old hunting pavilion, sat him down on the parliamentarians' benches, determined that he would return home every spring, compelled him to throw his regular parties, and prevented him from cutting his own throat. It was curiosity that kept him alive. ~ Joseph Roth

When I first entered the school, I was all set to tie my hair in a ponytail, get a fake tan, and write my homework in pink gel ink. I was prepared to hear girls bragging nonchalantly about the BMWs and diamond earrings they recieved for their birthday. I almost looked forward to hearing the flashlight-wielding nuns tell me to "leave room for the holy ghost" when I danced lewedly with messy-haired prep-school boys ~ Jennifer Allison

What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction. ~ Woodrow Wilson

I don't want to smoke cigars or go to stag parties, wear jockey shorts or pick up the check. ~ Shelley Winters

I've got some incredible fans actually - so loyal and they make me birthday cards and Christmas cards. I got this package of poems and artwork based around the songs. They've got this thing called 'Floetry' where they all have to put in artwork. They've set up their own competitions and stuff which is kind of amazing. ~ Florence Welch

In the art of literature there are two contending parties. Those who aim to tell stories that are more or less well thought out, and those who aim at beautiful language, beauty of form. This contest may last a very long time; each side has a fifty-fifty chance. Only the poet can rightfully demand that verse be beautiful and nothing but. ~ Paul Gauguin

Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking. ~ Jerry Saltz

When we founded Facebook, we put a lot of hours into it and worked hard every day. 'The Social Network' painted this picture that we were partying all the time, when really we only attended 2 or 3 parties during Facebook's first year. ~ Dustin Moskovitz

Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war. ~ Nigel Hamilton

Let all beings in all the worlds be happy. Include this universal prayer in your prayers every day. This is my birthday message to you. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

We've had the works. Indy's kidnappings and murder. Jet's kidnappings and rape attempt. Roxie's kidnapping and stalking. Car bombs. Grenades. Knife fights. Female wrestling at Chinese restaurants. Mayhem at a haunted house. Gunshots at a strip club. Showdowns at society parties. Now we got a vigilante on our hands. ~ Kristen Ashley

[On Philadelphia society:] The parties remind me of the Gay Nineties
the men are gay and the women are in their nineties. ~ Alice-Leone Moats

The system he (President Hosni Mubarak) is recommending would make it virtually impossible for truly independent parties to participate. Sham democracy should be exposed for what it truly is. ~ Madeleine Albright

I can remember in my early days of writing going to sort of writers' functions and parties and things like that, and I used to get very irritated because when people heard that you came from the suburbs, they had this notion that it was very un-cool to come from there. ~ Ronald Frame

For my birthday my husband learned to cook and is cooking one day a week for me. But he only likes to do fancy dishes. So we end up with weird, obscure things in the refrigerator. ~ Cheryl Hines

My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young - dub and garage would be banging through my house. ~ King Krule

Birthday should be considered as a unit of measurement to measure our present status toward success! ~ Mohith Agadi

The day before my 16th birthday I got my guitar. ~ Stevie Nicks

Let's see if I remember all of this - born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but raised in Salem by her mother, Susan, a teacher, and her father, Jacob, a police officer. Attended Salem Elementary School until your tenth birthday, when your father called into his station to report an unknown child in his house - "
"Stop," I muttered. Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life. " - but, bad luck, the PSFs beat the police to your house. Good luck, someone dropped the ball or they had other kiddies to pick up, because they didn't wait around long enough to question your parents, and thus, didn't pre-sort you. And then you came to Thurmond, and you managed to avoid their detecting you were Orange - " "Stop!" I didn't want to hear this - I didn't want anyone to hear it. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Why do the Fascists want violence?" Ethel asked rhetorically. "Those out there in Hills Road may be mere hooligans, but someone is directing them, and their tactics have a purpose. When there is fighting in the streets, they can claim that public order has broken down, and drastic measures are needed to restore the rule of law. Those emergency measures will include banning democratic political parties such as Labour, prohibiting trade union action, and jailing people without trial - people such as us, peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany - and it worked." She went on to talk about how Fascism ~ Ken Follett

All the romantic lore of our culture has told us when we find true love with a partner it will continue. Yet this partnership lasts only if both parties remain committed to being loving. Not everyone can bear the weight of true love. Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love. Many men, especially, often turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else. Ultimately, they choose power over love. To know and keep true love we have to be willing to surrender the will to power. ~ Bell Hooks

You are a child of humanity and every day is your precious birthday. ~ Debasish Mridha

If Americans wish to preserve a country they will recognize, then the first step is to recognize the enemy. Public education is the enemy. The entertainment industry is the enemy. The corporate culture is the enemy. The advertising industry is the enemy. And most of the politicians in both parties are the enemy. An enemy is defined as anybody, or any organization, which is attacking the traditional beliefs of Americans. ~ Charley Reese

For us, launching new systems is about bringing new consumer experiences to the marketplace and we're doing that with Nintendo land and third-party publishers are doing it with games like ZombiU. For us, now is the right time to launch new hardware. ~ Reggie Fils-Aime

Wish him a happy birthday for me. And assure him it will be his last. But yours is coming, isn't it? I don't doubt we'll spend it together. Until we meet again, Maven ~ Victoria Aveyard

19When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God. ~ Anonymous

In high school, I was too shy to perform. It's one thing to get laughs from your family, to be funny at parties and in class. It's another thing to get up on the stage. ~ Michael Keaton

I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein. Members of the United States Congress from both political parties saw that same threat. The United Nation's saw the threat. I made the right decision in getting Saddam Hussein out of power. ~ George W. Bush

A well-known psychologist once said, 'When a child reaches his third birthday, his parents will have given him half of all that they will ever be able to give him in the way of education. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed-motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation. ~ Anatol Rapoport

If you've ever signed up for a website and given a fake zip code or a fake birthday, you have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal - not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.1 The examples I've laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing. ~ Christian Rudder

I believe in the Constitution. I believe in separation of powers. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in limited government. And these are principles and policies that apparently neither the national Republican nor the national Democrat Party believes in. I believe great damage is being done to our Constitution, and I see no remedy at all, no likelihood of that changing, if we rely on the two parties to field our candidates for national office. ~ Bob Barr

At sixty a man has passed most of the reefs and whirlpools ... That man has awakened to a new youth ... Ergo, he is young. ~ George Luks

There was prom and finals and graduation. There were summer parties. Movies. Mini golf and dates and college orientations. There as life, moving on, and I missed it. Not because I couldn't go physically, but because I couldn't go emotionally. There were whole days when I couldn't leave my bed, not because of the bruises and scars, but because getting up and facing the world for another day felt too frightening, and too pointless. ~ Jennifer Brown

Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake." And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife's room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views. ~ Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Let me ... warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party. ~ George Washington

We have also heard within the last few hours that Rubeus Hagrid"--all three of them gasped, and so nearly missed the rest of the sentence--"well-known gamekeeper at Hogwarts School, has narrowly escaped arrest within the grounds of Hogwarts, where he is rumored to have hosted a 'Support Harry Potter' party in his house. However, Hagrid was not taken into custody, and is, we believe, on the run."
"I suppose it helps, when escaping from Death Eaters, if you've got a sixteen-foot-high half brother?" asked Lee.
"It would tend to give you an edge," agreed Lupin gravely. "May I just add that while we here at Potterwatch applaud Hagrid's spirit, we would urge even the most devoted of Harry's supporters against following Hagrid's lead. 'Support Harry Potter' parties are unwise in the present climate."
"Indeed they are, Romulus," said Lee, "so we suggest that you continue to show your devotion to the man with the lightning scar by listening to Potterwatch! And now let's move to news concerning the wizard who is proving just as elusive as Harry Potter. We like to refer to him as the Chief Death Eater, and here to give his views on some of the more insane rumors circulating about him, I'd like to introduce a new correspondent: Rodent."
"'Rodent'?" said yet another familiar voice, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione cried out together:
"Fred!"
"No--is it George?"
"It's Fred, I think," said Ron, leaning in closer, as whichever twin it was said,
"I'm not be ~ J.K. Rowling

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust. ~ Ralph Nader

Guests are invited to distract attention from the real aim of parties. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din