Quotes & Sayings About Twenties

I've been drunk only once in my life. But that lasted for twenty-three years. — W.C. Fields

Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twentysomething astutely put it, The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There's this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow. — Meg Jay

Said: "We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth - nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow." They aren't. They weren't. They never were. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I've never forgotten what it's like to be in your early twenties, which is not a particularly easy time. You've left your family, you've left the strictures of high school, and you're trying to break free and form yourself but you have to support yourself as well. We don't really give enough credence to that time of life and to its troubles. — Julia Leigh

As I get older, the more I don't want my life to be emotionally out of balance in the way it was in my twenties. — Elliot Cowan

I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn't but a lot of thought into what it might be like to be anything other than a straight white guy. Because when you're a straight white guy, you don't *have* to think about that ... — Patrick Rothfuss

New York is what Paris was in the twenties ... the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It's the greatest place on earth ... I've got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash. — John Lennon

But we didn't know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we'd grown up with. — Kent Haruf

Everyone - particularly my female friends I speak to - all say 'I wouldn't be in my twenties again if I was paid.' It's a difficult time. — Miranda Hart

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.
It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life. — Ariel Gore

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel. — Karen Russell

Marriage is grand. Divorce is about twenty grand. — Jay Leno

My twenties were my practice. My thirties were when I really hit my stride with GoPro and did all the heavy lifting to build the business. — Nick Woodman

I wouldn't want my daughters to date a guy like me. I was dangerous around women in my twenties. I'm terrified that they might end up with someone like me. — Antonio Banderas

I'm really happy in my own skin. There's a lot of judgment that can come from outside sometimes, and there's media scrutiny that is placed on a lot of women in the public eye, and I just couldn't care less. I really couldn't care less. 'I would sometimes say in my twenties, 'oh, I couldn't care less', but I think I probably did. Now I genuinely don't and that's a lovely, liberating thing to experience. — Kate Winslet

The low-ceiling price bazaar for sexual relief was a street called Middie Alley. You could barely get a pushcart through this avenue. Top price-twenty-five cents. — W.C. Fields

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013. — Stefan Sagmeister

I've never really socialized; I've always been anti-social and preferred to be at home. I was never, even my late teens and early twenties, into clubs and parties and stuff like that. — Megan Fox

Here's the thing: life is now. It's not ten pounds from now, it's not twenty pounds from now, it's not a million dollars from now. It's right now. And you just have to take a chance. — Jillian Michaels

Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don't wait too long to have children. — Janine Di Giovanni

She always says she doesn't believe women should get married before the age of thirty-five ... she says women change so much in their twenties, they can't possibly know who they are, and the choices they make before the age of thirty are rarely good ones. — Jane Green

I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties. — Lydia Davis

I was a guest in the home of a conductor when I was in my early twenties. They turned on the gramophone and played a popular record of a foxtrot. I liked the foxtrot, but I didn't like the way it was played. I confided my opinion to the host, who suddenly said, 'Ah, so you don't like the way it's played? All right, if you want, write down the number by heart and orchestrate it and I'll play it. That is, of course, if you can do it and in a given amount of time: I'm giving you an hour. if you're really a genius, you should be able to write it in an hour.' I did it in 45 minutes. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday) — Carrie Mae Weems

One look that works is better than twenty lines of dialogue. — John Wayne

I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown. — Ken Livingstone

If the women in the factories stopped work for twenty minutes, the Allies would lose the war. — Joseph Joffre

I've had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness. — Billy Corgan

High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11 — Stephanie Coontz

I suffered when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. I was awkward, I stuck out, I was nerdy. — Stephen Merchant

I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother. — Julia Quinn

When I look back on my twenties, I just remember being afraid of everything, and in my thirties, I'm actually excited by things. And if things don't work out, you know, by the time you've hit your thirties, you've had your fair share of disappointments. — Anne Hathaway

George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age? — Johnny Carson

At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me. — Susan Faludi

Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don't admit it (and you can't admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy you're starring in, your own life) ... because in your twenties you know, even if you don't admit this either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life. — Delia Ephron

Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas. — Matthew Specktor

'Entourage' is a great show, but it's fantasy. I spent my twenties in L.A. in this business, and my life didn't look anything like that. 'Big Bang' reflects a side of men that is rarely shown. We see their flaws - all of them. — Johnny Galecki

Having spent all of my teens and my twenties partying hard (very hard) then working the next day, I can assure you that losing bit of sleep to feed the thing you love most in the world is not a chore at all. Since having a baby I am better rested than ever. Sure, I can't party any more but I don't need to. Because I am happy. — James Mullinger

L.A.'s large convenience stores are so big they can accommodate up to twenty armed robbers at one time. — Jay Leno

The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be. — Andre Malraux

I think because I did become a well-known face in my thirties and not in my twenties, I was pretty settled in my boots and I knew who I was. And I think there's a sort of Scottish thing, too, where you don't take yourself too seriously, and you don't get carried away with your own sense of self-importance. — Ashley Jensen

Gabrielle and Elaine seemed to hit it off by talking books - something trending about a very young billionaire and his obsession with an even younger woman ... and sex. Lots of erotic sex scenes in the book like apparently on every page ... Who has time? Why even read about sex in a book when you can have it instead? I don't get that. And billionaires in their twenties? I mentally shook my head and pretended to care. I'm such a bastard. — Raine Miller

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers. — Edward Abbey

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy. — John Guare

I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal. — Sue Miller

If you're a man in your twenties or thirties, and you have yet to make your fortune, I would urge you not to get married. — Gene Simmons

Goalkeepers aren't born today until they're in their late twenties or thirties. — Kevin Keegan

Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder. In my twenties, living in New York City, I worked in a soup kitchen every Sunday for many years, just trying to do my part. Then I read Animal Liberation and learned about factory farming and the killing of animals for oven cleaner and realized nobody needed my help as badly as the animals did. — Karen Dawn

The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head. — Aristide Briand

You could fill a catalog with all you long for - for him to come back, for a do-over, for a different ending in which not only were you strong and said good-bye but he lived and made a success of his life and decades later you could look back together on your twenties and laugh at all your follies, for his voice on the other end of the phone call, for one more of those Albuquerque nights when it was easy to fall asleep knowing he was just in the next room. — Leigh Stein

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof. — Moby

I keep wondering if there is an afterlife, and if there is will they be able to break a twenty? — Woody Allen

But even in September, Thursday was a big money night, seven to eight hundred take-home, and that's what April concentrated on as she drove, Franny's chin starting to loll against her chest - April made herself think of that fat roll of tens and twenties she'd have at closing, how she'd fold it into the front pocket of her jeans then go to the house mom's office off the dressing room and give Tina a hundred before she found Franny in her pj's on Tina's brown vinyl couch, and she'd try not to think of the walls above Tina's desk covered with dancers' schedules and audition Polaroids of naked women, some of them under postcards from girls who came and went. — Andre Dubus III

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap. — Garth Greenwell

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. — Cheryl Strayed

But I've never been really rebellious. I've got a lot of support and I'm not pushed so hard that I feel like I'm going to burn out, which is what happens to a lot of actors in their early twenties. — Ellen Page

I like myself a lot more than I used to. I had a very difficult time in my twenties especially. It was hard for me to look in the mirror and find something that I liked about myself. — Janet Jackson

Friends are the twenty-first-century version of extended families. — Cynthia Heimel

I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her. — Susanna Clarke

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. — Helen Fielding

In the early years of the Roaring Twenties, American women not only won the right to vote but they also earned headlines along side their male counterparts during the Golden Age of American sports. Michael Bohn shares an engaging story of how two sports heroines, tennis player Helen Wills and swimmer Gertrude Ederle, helped embolden women to seek self-fulfillment by challenging the status quo. — Donna De Varona

I'd had a less tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood, but somewhere in my twenties I feel like I got stalled in the process and now I'm drifting, marking time without any great passion to move forward. — Janet Evanovich

Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed. — Camille Paglia

Modest, conventional expectations weren't enough to lure Adam Brown away from the power of drug addiction that ensnared him. Instead, the college dropout already in his mid-twenties found only the big, near-impossible dream of being a Navy SEAL captivating enough to consistently draw him to different choices. — Eric Blehm

I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now, except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly. — David Bowie

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. — Christopher Ryan

If I earn a million dollars a week and the average American earns a thousand dollars a week, then when I spend twenty thousand dollars on something it's the equivalent of the average American spending twenty dollars on something, right? — Jordan Belfort

I am pleased to say that I am not a tortured comedian - I laugh a lot. My twenties weren't particularly happy, but it's the same for a lot of people. In your thirties, you realise that your life and your worries are really insignificant, and you have to force yourself to be more positive and take each day as a gift. — Miranda Hart

It is most heartening to learn that young men and women, in their late teens and twenties, are increasingly attracted to meditative prayer in the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. May all the faithful find in the Eucharist their source of strength and courage to imitate our Lady, totally open to his will in their daily lives. It is my hope that this devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist will spread to more and more parishes and dioceses across our nation. — John Joseph O'Connor

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties. — Patricia McConnell

The House of Commons is called the Lower House, in twenty Acts of Parliament; but what are twenty Acts of Parliament amongst Friends? — John Selden

In the twenties the religious education of
children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code - in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It seems to me that if God felt it best to delay marriage into the latter part of your twenties, He would also see fit to delay the hormonal urge to want to have sex. Or perhaps it was never His intent to delay marriage in an effort to "become more independent," "enjoy singlehood," and "build our careers. — Vicki Courtney

I like being 30. I wouldn't want to do the twenties again. They are their own entity. — Jonathan Rhys Meyers

It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable. — Anne Waldman

I don't know how old I am because a goat ate the Bible that had my birth certificate in it. The goat lived to be twenty-seven. — Satchel Paige

Yajna is duty to be performed, or service to be rendered, all twenty-four hours of the day. — Mahatma Gandhi

I was always searching. I became a Buddhist in my twenties when I came to Los Angeles. I met a group of people who I really loved. — Alley Mills

Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designedThan other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind. — William Plomer

Stop it, girl. There's no way he's five-years-old. Or one hundred. He's probably like every other CEO on the planet: Late twenties, handsome in that geeky sort of way, and just as awkward as you. I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know I'm probably right. — Andrew Shaffer

I think, for the majority of my twenties, I was always so concerned with what I didn't have, or what I still wanted. — Adam Lambert

When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks their frustration to the point of irrationalism. Like themiddle-aged man ... who finds himself looking longingly at a girl in her early twenties. — Mark Hanna

It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals. — Jonathan Haidt

I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my life. — Chuck Palahniuk

Companies spend twenty, thirty, forty percent of revenues on advertising to brand their product and to get, essentially, acquire customers cheaply. You get a lot of exposure on something like this. — Bill Wyman

All through my twenties, I lived in very walkable cities - Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York. — Elizabeth Banks

She'd believed in forever in her twenties, when Gray had said it, meaning every word, and she'd believed in forever in her thirties, when William had said it, lying through his teeth. But she'd lived long enough to know that forever couldn't be guaranteed to anyone. Even tomorrow couldn't be relied upon. — Lisa Scottoline

There was a girl who came up to me on the street the other day, she bloomed out of the pavement ... and she must have been in her early twenties, and she said to me, 'You are my childhood.' About the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. -JK Rowling — J.K. Rowling

A girl sat neatly on a flat rock. Somehow he'd not seen her. She looked like she'd stepped through the screen of a 1950s movie. Her skin and blond hair were such pale shades they looked monochrome. Her long coat was tied at the waist by a fabric belt. She was probably a few years younger than him, in her early twenties, wearing a white hat with matching gloves. "Sorry," she said, "If I surprised you." Her irises were titanium gray, her most striking feature. Her lips were an afterthought and her cheekbones flat. But her eyes ... He realized he was staring into them and quickly looked away. — Ali Shaw

I'd never want to go back to being in my twenties or thirties. I was lost and confused and uncomfortable in my own skin. — Leslie Mann

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. — Edmund White

It wasn't until my late twenties that I learned that by working out I had given myself a great gift. I learned that nothing good comes without work and a certain amount of pain. When I finish a set that leaves me shaking, I know more about myself. When something gets bad, I know it can't be as bad as that workout. — Henry Rollins

Sometimes a story just needs an ending, and I used to not be a creative enough person to think of an ending to a romantic story that isn't a wedding or a death. This story didn't end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero nor a villain in my life. All I had to do now was move on. — Mindy Kaling

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done. — Barry Diller

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born. — Jill Lepore

I think probably the most difficult challenge was just the climb and rise in show business because I went through my entire twenties with some success as a comedy writer but not much as a performer. And you have to be kind of informed and naive at the same time. — Steve Martin

I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay. — Max Beerbohm

In my twenties, I was a bit of a worrier; it bothered me what people thought of me, what job I was doing. — Michelle Dockery