Twenty Third Birthday Quotes & Sayings

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of. — John G. Jackson

Gunner shook his head; he wasn't in the mood. He stared down at his bottle as he spoke. "Yeah, and what if I do go after it and what if I find no one, and I'm alone for the next sixty years? What then? Huh? Friends and family will get married. I'll be stuck buying gifts. Years pass: children, birthday parties. At dinner parties, I'll be odd man out, forcing people to arrange five chairs around a table instead of four or six. Or, okay, let's say maybe twenty years down the line I meet someone nice and I've already given up on ever finding true love. Let's say the girl is a few pounds overweight, has fizzy hair and an annoying laugh, but at this point, I'm also a few pounds overweight and my hair is thinning and my laughter is annoying. Maybe then the two of us get married, and both our groups of friends will say, 'See I told you that you'd find true love. It just took a while.' And we'll smile, but we'll both know it's a lie-- — Michael Anthony

Stop it. This is serious! (Selena)
Serious? Please. I'm standing out here on my twenty-ninth birthday, barefoot and in jeans my mother would burn, holding a stupid book to my chest in an effort to summon a Greek love-slave from the great beyond. (Grace) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It's Thursday, March twenty-ninth!" she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face. "You are really excited about knowing the date!" I yelled back. "HAZEL! IT'S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!" "Ohhhhhh," I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT'S ARBOR DAY! LET'S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc. — John Green

So that's the story of how I committed statutory rape less than twenty-four hours out of prison
on my birthday no less — Joanna Wylde

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it — Jules Renard

They don't want to know that you'll never eat birthday cake because you don't want to erase the magical taste of frosting on his lips. That you wake up ever day wondering why you got to live and he didn't. — Sarah Ockler

The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it. — Larry Niven

Exactly. We know that the great Goethe carried a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in his pocket for a year. Imagine that - an entire year! And not only Goethe but many other great Germans. Lessing and Heine reported a clarity and calmness that came from reading this book. Who knows, there may come a time in your life when you, too, will need the calmness and clarity that Spinoza's Ethics offers. I shan't ask you to read that book now. You're too young to grasp its meaning. But I want you to promise that before your twenty-first birthday you will read it. Or perhaps I should say, read it by the time you're fully grown. Do I have your word as a good German? — Irvin D. Yalom

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace. — Thom Gunn

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

On January 30, 1988, my twenty-seventh birthday, I became a strict vegetarian. I developed a passion for health and nutrition. My diet consists of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and legumes only, and has for the past 15 years now. — Dexter Scott King

I hadn't seen him in quite a while and he'd grown at least four inches in the months between our visits. With his perfect teeth and constant huge smile I found myself looking at him in a whole new way. Gone was the skinny kid whose birthday was the day before my own and loved saying we were the same age for that twenty four hour period before I officially turned a year older than him. He wasn't that twelve year old who'd yanked on my hair and put baby oil in the sunblock so I got a nasty burn when we visited a theme park together. Suddenly I saw Jim wasn't a little kid anymore. He was a guy - a hot guy at that. A hot guy who spent the entire day glued to my side. — Melissa Simmons

Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence. — Harold Bloom

Washington had learned the secrets of inducing others to follow his lead. Washington probably knew more about leadership before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday than John Adams discovered in his lifetime. — John Ferling

Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows. — Jane Smiley

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers ... shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. — Salman Rushdie

In a few days you'll be twenty-something - twenty-five, twenty-six, sixty-three, doesn't matter.
You're no better off - mentally, physically, financially, emotionally, and so on - than you were at the time of your last birthday; and maybe the one before that even.
In fact, things seem kind of worse.
Then again, maybe things are too much the same.
Maybe sameness worsens as time moves forth.
Shouldn't sameness stay the same? — Brian Alan Ellis

He hadn't taken drugs for many years, and had also given up drinking. According to Tony Visconti, he and David went to AA: "David found it very useful. We talk about being each other's support system. If two people from the program sit together, that's technically an AA meeting. Every two or three days we talk about it, although we don't start and end with a prayer. I'll say, 'I'm coming up to my twelfth birthday,' and he says, 'Well it's been my twenty-third.' I ask, 'Do you miss it?' and he says, 'I don't miss it at all. — Wendy Leigh

A year ago on my twenty-third birthday, I rebuffed the advances of a beautiful young woman whom I did not love. Alas, she turned out to be a sorceress. She repaid me by casting a spell that forces every female I touch to fall into a frenzy of lust." His mouth twisted bitterly. "Thus she robbed me of one of mankind's greatest gifts - the ability to seek and find true love. — Jo Grafford

Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake. — Bill Bryson

How old are you, anyway?"
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
I raise a brow.
"Almost. I'll be seventeen in two weeks. You?"
Part of me doesn't want to tell her. She'll be horrified. But part of me wants to know what she will do when she knows the truth. "How old do you think I am?"
She lifts a slender shoulder. "At first I thought maybe eighteen, but now I'm thinking at least nineteen. Maybe even twenty?"
"why's that?"
"You seem very ... experienced."
I nod. "You're close. Today's my birthday. I'm thirteen. — Darynda Jones

When's your birthday?"
I was taken aback by the question. "I don't like presents,"I said quickly, in case he got any ideas. "Who said anything about presents? I'm just asking for your date of birth."
"Thirtieth of February," I said, throwing out the first date that came to mind.
Xavier raised an eyebrow.
"Are you sure about that?"
I panicked. What had I said wrong? I ran through the months in my head and realised my mistake. OOPS
there were only twenty-eight days in February! "I mean thirtieth of April," I corrected and grinned sheepishly.
Xavier laughed. "You're the first person I've ever known to forget her own birthday. — Alexandra Adornetto

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

It was on my twenty-sixth birthday that it finally hit me: Love was bullshit. There was no happily ever after. — Cindi Madsen

You belong to me now, and I'll be back to get yo after your twenty-first birthday, when the time is right. No one else can touch you until then and I'll always be around to make sure. — Michelle A. Valentine

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles. — Mary Antin

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

Jacob remembered it distinctly because it was his twenty-second birthday, and he was annoyed at being awakened by his uncle at 1:17 in the morning. But Avi had no time to be sentimental. He ordered Jacob to hightail it with him through a bone-chilling winter night to get to some safe house they'd never been to before and make it there by the top of the hour. Jacob had been hoping to sleep in a little and maybe eat a half-decent meal before sitting down to plan the sabotage of a radio tower near Antwerp, an operation scheduled for the coming weekend. But none of that was to be. — Joel C. Rosenberg

I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time. — Graham Greene

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating. — Arnold Bennett

When will I go home?" Patricia asked. "What, do you want to go home for your birthday?" Cinque sneered. Patricia would turn twenty on February 20. This was, perhaps, the most unnerving thing that Cinque had said to her. He knew her birthday. It underlined that this was no random attack. They had been researching her life, which was chilling. - — Jeffrey Toobin

I tried to compete with my ill-fitting Calvin Klein button-up shirts that I got at Ross and my imitation mini-ish skirts I got from the DEB. If you're not familiar with DEB, it's like the trashy stepsister of Forever 21 that takes F21 out for her twenty-first birthday, pumps her full of Jell-O shots, and convinces her to get a bald-eagle tattoo. — Grace Helbig

As a first-generation Ethiopian immigrant, Sheba had lived in Charleston since she turned five years of age. She was Ethiopian by birth, but American by preference. She had worked hard, studied and sacrificed plenty to get where she was today, no easy feat for someone who had just celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday. According to her friends, Sheba was a beauty, though when she looked in the mirror, she saw inevitable flaws; her cheekbones were too pronounced, her mouth a little too wide, her nose with that perturbing slant to it. Still, she accepted compliments gratefully, especially from her roommate, Janelle. Janelle was the true beauty, Sheba thought, with dark ebony skin so smooth that she could be a walking ad for Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate. — Joanna Hynes

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