Twenty One Quotes

No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love
how can there be any separate concerns in that case? ~ Honore De Balzac

There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ~ Virginia Woolf

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Hisli's tail flicked to the side as the arrow buried itself in the sand just inches behind her rear hooves. But Ansel didn't dare look over he shoulder. She kept riding, and she did not stop. Celeana lowered her bow and watched until Ansel disappeared beyond the horizon. One arrow, that had been her promise. But she's also promised Ansel that she's had twenty minutes to get out of range.
Celeana had fired after twenty-one. ~ Sarah J. Maas

FACE THE NATION is the second oldest program on television. It began in 1954, fifty-eight years ago. I've been here at the table for the last twenty-one. ~ Rodney Erickson

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children's lunch boxes. ~ Lionel Shriver

Everything you now do is something you have chosen to do. Some people don't want to believe that. But if you're over age twenty-one, your life is what you're making of it. To change your life, you need to change your priorities ~ John C. Maxwell

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. ~ Don DeLillo

You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

At twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this; that's the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. ~ Booth Tarkington

I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with. ~ Laura Z. Hobson

He could gaze upon a particular deep shade of green and pick out every nuance of the color. Zeluppian Fern Green, his mind would inform him. Gray, said his soul. Just a shade of gray with a greenish name. His well-trained tongue could pick out every flavor of a sweetmeat. Honey from bees fed only cowslip nectar, his mind would tell him, with cherries marinated for twenty-one years in peach-and-saffron brandy. Ash, said his soul. Ash and dust. Even ~ Frances Hardinge

So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised. ~ Susan B. Anthony

Can't stop thinking about if and when I die. For now I see that "if" and "when" are truly different cries for "if" is purely panic and "when" is solemn sorrow and one invades today while the other spies tomorrow. ~ Twenty One Pilots

Tillie studied her mother's face. The face which had seen thirty-seven years of life. Twenty-one years of marriage. The birth of ten babies. The death of one. ~ Deeanne Gist

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty - and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Our dia continued. 'When I was twenty-one years old, my niang told me that I was to marry a nice girl aged eighteen. I told her, "I don't want to marry anyone, I don't know how to be a husband." She replied, "All you have to do is love her. She will teach you the rest about life." Little did I know then, but by fate I had married a rare jewel, the most precious jewel I could ever wish for. I treasured and loved her from the time I lifted her veil. I still love her today and will love her for the remainder of my humble life. ~ Li Cunxin

Towering is the confidence of twenty-one. ~ Samuel Johnson

and exactly twenty-one feet from the ground. From there it fell about nine feet, culminating in a perfect hangman's knot, one that Seth had undoubtedly worked on for some time. The noose was straight from the textbook with thirteen ~ John Grisham

New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."
"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."
"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"
"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.
"How's that?"
"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . . ~ James Howard Kunstler

When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years. ~ Mark Twain

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away? ~ Michael Thomas Ford

For twenty-one years, I have been paralyzed by the fear of what this society will do with me if they ever were to know of the thoughts that I continually push away. For more than two decades, I have made a choice to be straight. After all, it's as easy as making a choice, isn't it? This culture has made sure that I know that. Anyone who is anything other than straight was just someone deceived by the devil. He is unnatural. He is confused. He is mistaken. He is weak. He can control it if he desires to control it. Such a compelling and ongoing argument has been made that I have always trusted it.
I believed that if I hid it long enough, and ran from it long enough, and refused to acknowledge it for long enough, I could indeed succeed at living up to their decrees. I believed that I could force myself to never be anything else. ~ Dan Pearce

Ever since I was a kid, I was always a fan of hip hop. If you get your limelight whether your sixteen or twenty-one or wherever you're at, you get your lime when you get your lime, but if you're a part of hip hop and a child of hip hop, then you will always be a part of hip hop. ~ Lil' Mama

Un-fucking-believable," Mark muttered. "In a country where they let embryos drive cars, I have to wait until I'm twenty-one to buy alcohol. What sort of place lets you drive and vote and fuck before it lets you drink a beer?" He glared at Deacon accusingly. "Well? ~ Lisa Henry

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. ~ Haruki Murakami

People usually focus on what burglars take, but it's how they move that's so consistently interesting. Burglars explore. They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors - but they make it look as if they do. They have their own tools and floor plans, their own ways to get from A to B. They'll curl up inside refrigerators, climb through ceilings, use garbage chutes and fall twenty-one floors straight into the emergency room when they could simply have taken the stairs. They'll slip through porch screens and stow themselves inside clothes dryers till the police come busting in to find them. ~ Geoff Manaugh

Rita could find fault with a twenty-one-gun salute in her honor. "Too noisy," she'd complain. "All that gun powdah makes me cough." Bernice, on the other hand, was overjoyed when a salesman from the cremation place informed her that her ashes would weigh about six pounds. "Thin at last!" she shrieked. ~ Jennifer Coburn

Cancer runs in our family. I lost my grandmother to it. There's a saying that you meet people and instantly know them. My grandmother and I had that. The first time my heart was broken was when my grandmother passed away. I was twenty-one. ~ Cote De Pablo

You have twenty-one days to shoot a whole movie and sometimes you go into that thinking 'ugh, this could potentially be really, really difficult' and it turns out to be the most incredible experience. ~ Kathleen Robertson

The mental capacity of a person to make reasonable contracts, is the only criterion, by which to determine his legal capacity to make obligatory contracts. And his mental capacity to make reasonable contracts is certainly not to be determined by the fact that he is, or is not, twenty-one years of age. ~ Lysander Spooner

While you're doing fine, there's some people and I
Who have a really tough time getting through this life
So excuse us while we sing to the sky. ~ Twenty One Pilots

MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists. ~ Robert Hughes

The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined. ~ Gene Baur

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. ~ Laura Lippman

Celebrated the evening with one of my building's valets - a twenty-one-year-old kid who only made it five pumps, but brought some good weed and laughed at my jokes. It was a sad start to my new life.
Torre, Alessandra (2014-08-24). Black Lies (Kindle Locations 143-145). Alessandra Torre. Kindle Edition. ~ Alessandra Torre

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. ~ Jane Austen

Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community. ~ Brigham Young

A person who's going to be famous usually drops a few clues by the time they're twenty-one. ~ Frank D. Gilroy

Therefore, at about the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a "regular job." I have not always been able to fulfill this vow. I have had to work (in a reasonably independent manner) for the Church and for a graduate school, but since the age of forty-two I have been a free lance, a rolling stone, and a shaman ... ~ Alan W. Watts

At twenty-one, Mark had been long and leanly muscled, not a spare inch on him. Rainey's gaze ran down his thirty-four-year-old body and she had to admit he was even better now. In fact, the only way to improve on that body would be to dip it into chocolate. ~ Jill Shalvis

Got a job for you, Seven."
"Yeah?"
"I need you to find someone."
"Who?"
"A woman," I say. "About five and a half feet tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes."
"That describes half the women in New York."
"Yeah, well, the one I'm looking for is twenty-one or so," I say. "She's good-looking, kind of curvy for being so petite... got a red 'S' tattooed on her wrist..."
He stares at me, like he expects more information. "What else?"
I shrug, glancing at the high heels, flipping them over to look at the red soles. "She wears a size thirty-nine shoe."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Shouldn't be too hard," he says, blinking a few times as he looks at the ground. "Only a couple million people in the city."
"That's the spirit," I say, slapping him on the back. ~ J.M. Darhower

I came across an account of a young man named Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was eventually captured and executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old. I read his story as I had read many others, turning the pages, skimming here and there: this sabotage, that tactic, this capture, that escape. After a while even courage becomes routine to the reader. Then, quite unprepared, I turned the page and faced a photograph of Kim Malthe-Bruun. He wore a turtleneck sweater, and his thick, light hair was windblown. His eyes looked out at me, unwavering on the page. Seeing him there, so terribly young, broke my heart. ~ Lois Lowry

The high-strung Frieda made the mistake of telling Frau Fleschner that she had a toothache. She was taken to a dentist. He pulled ten of her teeth! After one day, they put her back in the fields, spitting blood. She was twenty-one years old. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking. ~ Steven Pinker

Someone said that thirty was a significant birthday, and everyone around the table agreed. Someone else said it was the first time you heard the bell.
What bell? someone asked.
But they all knew what bell. It was like you'd already completed a few laps, observed another, but this was the first time you'd properly heard the bell. There had been one at seven, but you hadn't heard it because you were so young; and then one at fourteen but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy looking over your shoulder; then another at twenty-one but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy talking; and then one at twenty-eight which for some reason took two years before you heard it. But they all agreed you did hear that one, eventually.
Your lousy career, said one guest. Babies, said one of the women. Lovers, friends, travel, said another. Parents aging. Bong. All the things you hadn't done. Might not do. Bong. ~ Graham Joyce

When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a woman's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little. ~ Dale Spender

With a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune. ~ Inez Haynes Irwin

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa - two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. ~ Meg Donohue

You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was in bed at my beach house, but could not sleep because of some fried chicken in the icebox that I felt entitled to. I waited till my wife dropped off, and tiptoed into the kitchen. I remembered looking at the clock. It was precisely four-fifteen. I'm quite certain of this, because our kitchen clock has not worked in twenty-one years and is always at that time. I also noticed that our dog, Judas, was acting funny. He was sanding up on his hind legs and singing, 'I Enjoy Being a Girl.' Suddenly the room turned bright orange. At first, I thought my wife had caught me eating between meals and set fire to the house. Then I looked out the window, where to my amazement I saw a gigantic cigar-shaped aircraft hovering just over the treetops in the yard and emitting an orange glow. I stood transfixed for what must have been several hours, though our clock still read four-fifteen, so it was difficult to tell. Finally, a large, mechanical claw extended from the aircraft and snatched the two pieces of chicken from my hand and quickly retreated. When I reported the incident to the Air Force, they told me that what I had seen was a flock of birds. When I protested, Colonel Quincy Bascomb personally promised that the Air Force would return the two pieces of chicken. To this day, I have only received one piece. ~ Woody Allen

He met her on 26 December 1969, five days before the end of the sixties, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one. ~ Salman Rushdie

Don't you think you're quite young?'
'I'm twenty-one,' said Brida. 'If I wanted to start learning ballet, I'd be conseidered too old. ~ Paulo Coelho

Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female,
you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time. ~ Margaret Atwood

Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey - in this connection at least fifty children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke, or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear concerning it; and war among the town's ladies over who could set the best table for the evangelist. ~ Harper Lee

The following spring was a time of calving. Great icebergs calved from the vast glaciers which stretched down to our fjords from distant mountains. The heifers and cows of Kaupangen gave birth to over one hundred calves that spring. Most survived. Gudrod, the master shepherd, had seventy-five new lambkins skipping after their mothers. Ten sets of lamb twins were born in the city that year. Bitches had pups suckling at their breasts. The mountain goats that stood watch over the fjord, indifferently chewing on the wild grasses between the rocks, had kids following them on their steep paths. The residents of the city, too, gave birth. Twenty-one new healthy babies were born within thirty days of the spring equinox; boys and girls with thick blonde, brown, black, or red hair; others with smooth bald heads. Olaf, my third father, my king, had a son, stillborn. Olaf wept. Kenna wept. I wept as the boy was buried inside the casket with his mother in our graveyard by the church. ~ Jason Born

As a twenty-one-year-old college student, Daisy Richmond's answer to the question "If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do?" was full of adventure and travel to exotic lands. As a twenty-seven-year-old woman who is faced with a recurrence of breast cancer, her answer is very different. Before I Go is the poignant story of Daisy's journey to navigate the unexpected twists and turns of life, and the painful process of letting go of everything but love. ~ Colleen Oakley

My commitment falters. "It comes out. Twenty-one washes." That's not what I intended to say. The plan was to put my hand on my hip and say, "It's my hair. I can do what I want with it." That's what brave, angsty teenagers say after they do something rebellious. But I'm pretty sure those teenagers didn't ever have to answer to someone like my mother. I'm also sure I'm neither brave nor angsty. ~ Kasie West

He had said it was only a twenty-one-mile drive to the Falls and should take half an hour on a good day. She'd been driving for over two hours so far. Obviously today wasn't a good day. ~ Nicki Edwards

In the past I've tended to overreact. I was sure I'd be a superstar by the time I was twenty-one. Baseball messed up my plan of life. When I fail I get upset. Sometimes I get upset too quickly, without thinking of consequences. ~ Albert Belle

For the first time in twenty-one years, I want to be kissed. I want to feel his mouth on mine. ~ E.L. James

Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son's eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs - storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor - essential to the market economy. ~ Eric Foner

I'd like to see twenty-one links completed when I return. Threats on your well-being are poor excuses for missing homework!

He drew a happy face after that - two dots and a curving line - and signed his name. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

Sometimes quiet is violent
I find it hard to hide it
My pride is no longer inside
It's on my sleeve
My skin will scream reminding me of
Who I killed inside my dream
I hate this car that I'm driving
There's no hiding for me
I'm forced to deal with what I feel
There is no distraction to mask what is real
I could pull the steering wheel ~ Twenty One Pilots

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Did you know that when someone dies their body weight drops quite suddenly? It is not really noticeable unless you have held them close whilst they are dying, praying to every god that you won't lose them. It is just a touch. But it's there when they leave you.
Twenty-one grams. That is the weight of a human soul. ~ Nikita Gill

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn't. Instead, he forged a note that said, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?" (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don't know what you're talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. ~ Ryan Holiday

Well how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There's probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem to most people like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse. ~ Caroline Kettlewell

Layne knew he was in love with her. Not only that, he'd never stopped loving her. Not once, not for a second, not for twenty-one years.
Fuck him. ~ Kristen Ashley

I have been hunted for twenty-one years. I have literally lived in the saddle. I have never known a day of perfect peace. ~ Frank James

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But, if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat. ~ Mark Twain

I'm twenty-one," she said indignantly. "Really?" "Yes, why do you sound skeptical?" "I wouldn't have expected to find a woman of your age in such a predicament." "I'm almost always in a predicament." Pandora jerked as she felt a gentle pressure on her back. "Hold ~ Lisa Kleypas

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half, so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars; which evidently shews them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies. ~ Jonathan Swift

Leaving me an orphan like those characters I had spoken of the night before, if one can truly be called an orphan at twenty-one years of age. ~ John Boyne

You always look so damn happy to see me," he said, low. "And it's like a fist in my gut, every time. I wait for it not to happen, for you to get used to me, or maybe you're tired or you had a bad day, so you're in no mood to shine, but no. There's always that smile." - Ty, Chapter Twenty-One ~ Ann Aguirre

Ancient Rule of Twenty-one: if you do anything for twenty-one days in a row, it will be installed as a habit. ~ Robin S. Sharma

In fact, once when I imprinted on a young lady's lips a chaste and fatherly kiss for about five minutes, I stopped and said, sorrowfully, "Wouldn't you rather be kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy?"
She frowned and said, "Of course not. If you'd ever been kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy you'd know better than to ask."
Remember that. In any direct competition, the old man is bound to win and the young man knows it. ~ Isaac Asimov

The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten. ~ George William Curtis

When I rest my head on the couch I know that it's coming, coming like something in the mail, something sent away for. We know it is coming, but are not sure when
weeks? months? She is fifty one. I am twenty-one. My sister is twenty-three. My brothers are twenty-four and seven.
We are ready. We are not ready. People know.
Our house sits on a sinkhole. Our house is the one being swept up in the tornado, the little train-set model floating helplessly, pathetically around in the howling black funnel. We're weak and tiny. We're Grenada. There are men parachuting from the sky.
We are waiting for everything to finally stop working
the organs and systems, one by one, throwing up their hands
"The jig is up," says the endocrine; "I did what I could," says the stomach, or what's left of it; "We'll get em next time," adds the heart, with a friendly punch to the shoulder. ~ Dave Eggers

They say it takes twenty-one days to break a habit. It's been approximately one thousand eight hundred and twenty six since I last held her hand in mine and I'm still waiting for the remnants of her to break off of me. ~ Claire Contreras

Old age is really a disguise that no one but the old themselves see through. I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me - sometimes even from itself - and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay. I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on. But ~ May Sarton

Kink is only sexy when done between consenting adults," Nora said. "So don't do any kink until you're at least eighteen. No, twenty-one. Thirty. Thirty's a good age to start. And do your homework. And stay in school. And don't do drugs. God, I'm a hypocrite. Someone find me my beer. Please. ~ Tiffany Reisz

One study states that repeating a particular motion sixty times a day over twenty-one days will form a new habit that will become ingrained in your mind. ~ Thomas M. Sterner

How is this happening? It'd been so long, and for years he'd deliberately chosen not to remember. But now, a flood of details storming back into his mind in an incredibly intimate wave. And her, looking even more beautiful than he had been able to remember. The love of his life, though he hadn't known it back in this moment, twenty-one long years ago. If he'd had any idea, he was convinced he wouldn't have given up so goddamn easily. ~ Keith C. Meyer

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one. ~ Cynthia Voigt

I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink, but now I'm insecure and I care what people think. ~ Twenty One Pilots

I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it! ~ Susan B. Anthony

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one. ~ David Bergen

Well,Sir," she began,"I am twenty-one years old & still a virgin. I have never experienced sexual intercourse. My hymen is not broken.Old men say that a virgin`s Nectar is good for them. I understand that you want to buy. I want to sell."[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable. ~ Orson Welles

Scott's friends on the forum didn't know his big picture. They read a phrase like "It's going to kill me to live without him" for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn't read more than those nine words into the message. They didn't take offense, didn't try to talk him out of it. Didn't resent it for its presumed relativity.

"Of course it is," they said. And it was the same way they'd responded to every other thing he'd told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement - he'd had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn't need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he'd written. ~ Julie Lawson Timmer

Basically, we are all responsible for the preservation of our personal joy; but happiness is different. Joy is not circumstantial, happiness is. You can be depressed and still have joy. You can be suicidal and still have joy. We all stop thinking and we all stop talking and we all stop sharing and we all stop creating, because by doing any of these things we quickly find out just how unhappy we are. But that's okay. That's normal. Don't let the fear of unhappiness cripple your pursuit of finding what it is you believe. Since joy is found in belief, we all have to push through unhappiness to find joy. Basically. ~ Tyler Joseph

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate. ~ Dean Koontz

I thought about my dad the whole time I sat there, remembering special moments, we'd shared, reminiscing about the little quirks he had, picturing his face so clearly in my mind. I focused on what I had had, on what some people never got for even a minute. I had had him for twenty-one years. I was lucky-I had been blessed. ~ Mia Sheridan

I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number. ~ Robert Indiana

But my point, Mattie - if I have a point, Mattie - is this: kind of try to live up to the best that's in you. If you give your word to people, let them know that they're getting the word of the best. If you room with some dopey girl at college, try to make her less dopey. If you're standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you've got a buck - but only if you can do it without patronizing her. That's the trick, baby.' -Last Day of the Last Furlough ~ J.D. Salinger

Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections. ~ Laurence H. Tribe

Cursing herself, she said, I'm going to man up here. I'm going to so be twenty-one. You're not going to believe how tight in the head I'm going to be. Really. For real. ~ J.R. Ward

The state of Virginia had turned down twenty-one thousand women for admission to state colleges in 1970 while not turning away a single man ... ~ Meg Waite Clayton

If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait. ~ Amy Bloom