Self Made Birthday Quotes & Sayings

I remember for my 18th birthday, I was going to get a tattoo, and I made the mistake of thinking I was a man and telling my father, and he was like, 'Oh yeah? You better tattoo a new address on your arm, because you're not living here!' And that was the end of that discussion. — Adam Ferrara

The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black verticle stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the verticle stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize verticle forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself. — Kevin Brockmeier

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work. — Karl Jaspers

The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ("The Pool") — Daphne Du Maurier

I wanted to be the next Dana Carvey. This was my ultimate goal. If I ever cut into a birthday cake and made a wish, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' If I threw a coin into a fountain, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' If I saw a shooting star, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' — Jimmy Fallon

I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud. — T.E. Lawrence

For Swan's birthday, Calla made pineapple upside-down cake, which is not the kind of cad you put candles on. So there was nothing to blow and make wishes on. Nobody missed the candles, because when you're eating pineapple upside-down cake, there is nothing much left to wish for — Jenny Wingfield

With my wife I don't get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to 'the best woman a man ever had.' The waiter joined me. — Rodney Dangerfield

Good morning, Sunshine," Alessandro whispered, dragging the satiny soft object across the tip of her nose. Curiosity made her open her eyes. A rose. A blue rose. "I figured a single rose was safer than a dozen considering the massacre of the last blue roses I gave you," he smiled sheepishly. "Happy birthday, darling." Bree blinked and tried to remember what day it was. The fifteenth apparently. She groaned and pulled the blankets back over her head. She was officially thirty today. "Come on now, up we go," Alessandro pulled the blankets off her face and grabbed her arm, bringing her up. "For my birthday, I want sleep," she groaned. Gianni had suffered through a painful night as another tooth was starting to come in and thus his parents had suffered as well. "Nope, we've got a long day ahead of us. Let's go." "Why?" Bree yawned. "Because thirty years ago you were born and my life as I knew it would never be the same," Alessandro explained, nuzzling her neck. — E. Jamie

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel. — Shashi Tharoor

When I was a kid, for my birthday every year, my mother made me pasta bechamel, which is rigatoni with a white cream sauce. — Giada De Laurentiis

Birthdays were made for going wild over the people we think are amazing. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London — Charles Dickens

Lucy took care of me on the set, and made sure that none of the crew cussed around me. She also had birthday parties for me and made sure that they were well attended. — Keith Thibodeaux

I went by Kyle, and I made friends on the team as Kyle. It went on for a pretty long time, until I went to a birthday party in a dress and all the hockey players were like ... 'Kyle?' — Katie Nolan

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

So much of love is curiousity, a search inside the other for some little piece of self; emerging from the bear cave of them with your birthday candle and filament of ore: the same as that I'm made of! — Anna Funder

Principal Brill, those costumes were made by my mother. My mother, who has stage four small-cell lung cancer. My mother, who will never watch her little boy celebrate another Halloween again. My mother, who will more than likely experience a year of 'lasts'. Last Christmas. Last birthday. Last Easter. And if God is willing, her last Mother's Day. My mother, who when asked by her nine-year-old son if he could be her cancer for Halloween, had no choice but to make him the best cancerous tumor-riden lung costume she could. So if you think it's so offensive, I suggest you drive them home yourself and tell my mother to her face. Do you need my address? — Colleen Hoover

Her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. — Charles Dickens

I'm trying to get the record that I made at my birthday party last year, trying to get that out, and the lawyers are diddling around with it and it probably won't be out until next year. I don't know. — Marian McPartland

On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble ... There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread. — Sonya Hartnett

Monsoon Love is a love story with a few comic twists. The idea for this story came to me when I went into the local town of Pokhara with a friend to buy his son a birthday present. We had just arrived at the shops when a heavy down pour began, and as we had arrived on his motorbike and didn't have raincoats or umbrellas so we had to wait for the rain to stop. We were standing under a awning watching the street while we waited, and I noticed this very beautiful young woman walk past me dressed in a t-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled half up her legs, but the way she held her umbrella made it impossible to see her face, though with the nice body she had her face must have been just as lovely. Then I though, imagine some guy stuck working in an office, and seeing a view like that every day of the same woman, and falling in love with her despite not seeing her face. — Andrew James Pritchard

For certain you can be helped, should you accept it. But as far as being made ... no one can do that. This occurred on the day you were born. An earth day is not a birth day. Own what you create as well as what you break. — T.F. Hodge

He wasn't like some of the hippies in England, where the qualification to rebel is planted by the guilt raised from being a spoilt child with a good education. He was a real hippy born from being forced to kill for his army until he was twenty one. He had long hair because the army made him shave his head. The army made him shave every day too. Now he had a beard. His face for a long time was not his own. When this guy said he was all about peace he wasn't talking about peace because his mum never got him the horse he wanted for his eighteenth birthday, he was talking about peace because he'd seen war. He talked about love because he knew hate: hate for those above him, hate for those he had served with, hate for enemies not born his but who became so and, lastly, hate for himself for how his mind had been controlled. — Craig Stone

He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric's Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house ... He might even have had brothers and sisters ... It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him. — J.K. Rowling

As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel. — Claire Tomalin

So she told me a story. A story about a boy who was born with very green eyes, and the man who was so captivated by their color that he searched the world for a stone in exactly the same shade." His voice is fading now, falling into whispers so quiet I can hardly hear him. "She said the boy was me. That this ring was made from that very same stone, and that the man had given it to her, hoping one day she'd be able to give it to me. It was his gift, she said, for my birthday." He stops. Breathes. "And then she took it off, slipped it on my index finger, and said, 'If you hide your heart, he will never be able to take it from you'. — Tahereh Mafi

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story. — Michael Chabon

Andy: Andrew Makepeace Ladd, the Third, accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Channing Gardner for a birthday party in honor of their daughter Melissa on April 19th, 1937 at half past three o'clock.
Melissa: Dear Andy: Thank you for the birthday present. I have a lot of Oz books, but not 'The Lost Princess of Oz.' What made you give me that one? Sincerely yours, Melissa.
Andy: I'm answering your letter about the book. When you came into second grade with that stuck-up nurse, you looked like a lost princess.
Melissa: I don't believe what you wrote. I think my mother told your mother to get that book. I like the pictures more than the words. Now let's stop writing letters. — A.R. Gurney

I was born on Nov. 4, which is election day ... my birthday has made more men and sent more back to honest work than any other days in the year. — Will Rogers

Thank you so much...
For looking at my unorthodox stylings as an author...
Then realizing the books were still worth it...
You have made a Birthday AWESOME...

Eleven hours ago I gave away 271 books. As the day finished I gave away 721 books and even sold a few from my other series.

Thank you, is just not enough.... To you, who show that words can come in many ways... You have my endless Gratitude!! (12/15/2013) — Eri Nelson

I suddenly realized how much I loved her when we attended Alfred Hitchcock's 75th birthday party last August. There was something magical about that night, and it made me see how much she really meant to me. — Rod Taylor

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little. — Charlotte Bronte

Tis like the birthday of the world,
When earth was born in bloom;
The light is made of many dyes,
The air is all perfume:
There's crimson buds, and white and blue,
The very rainbow showers
Have turned to blossoms where they fell,
And sown the earth with flowers. — Thomas Hood