Twenty One Quotes

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

  Brigham Young

  Marriage, Men, Community

  14 Copy quote

• A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

  Muhammad Ali

  Life, Motivational, Happy Birthday

  Muhammad Ali (2016). “Muhammad Ali Unfiltered: Rare, Iconic, and Officially Authorized Photos of the Greatest”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

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• At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Birthday, Time, Growing Up

  'Poor Richard's Almanac' (1741) June

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• When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

  Mark Twain

  Love, Funny, Motivational

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.121, Courier Corporation

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• Other pirates leaped over the railing. One, two... seven... thirteen. A baker’s dozen. Wait, fifteen. Eighteen... Twenty-one. The odds weren’t in our favor. “Maybe they just came over to borrow a cup of sugar,” I said. Andrea barked a short laugh. Curran put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s a lot of sugar. Must be a big cake.

  Ilona Andrews

  Two, Odds, Hands

  Ilona Andrews (2013). “Magic Rises: A Kate Daniels Novel”, p.48, Penguin

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• 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

  Real, Believe, Men

  J.R. Ward (2011). “J.R. Ward The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8”, p.2834, Penguin

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• Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

  Tim O'Brien

  Dream, Hurt, Writing

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.54, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Fall, Brave, Age

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• 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

  Past, Race, People

  Don DeLillo (2011). “Cosmopolis”, p.19, Pan Macmillan

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• Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

  Ray Bradbury

  Promise, Balance, Twenties

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• A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

  Haruki Murakami

  Stars, Past, Men

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• 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

  Girl, Sweet, Depressing

  4 Copy quote

• I don’t see any police cars.” “They probably had to park a couple blocks over. Anyway, as I was saying, I noticed illegal substances in the hands of a few guests.” “So?” she snapped. “It’s a party.” “Alcohol is illegal under the age of twenty-one.” “Great!” Marcie shouted. “What am I going to do?” She paused, then raised her voice again. “You probably called them!” “Who, me?” Vee said. “And lose the free food? No way.

  Becca Fitzpatrick

  Couple, Block, Party

  Becca Fitzpatrick (2013). “The Complete Hush, Hush Saga: includes Hush, Hush; Crescendo; Silence and Finale”, p.419, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Thinking, Ballet, Twenties

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• 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

  Clever, Home, Blessing

  Jane Austen (2008). “Emma: By Jane Austen”, p.2, MobileReference

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• 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

  Teenage, Mistake, Believe

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• There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

  Kevin Hearne

  Thinking, Insane, Twenties

  Kevin Hearne (2014). “The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle: Hounded, Hexed, Hammered, Tricked, Trapped, Hunted”, p.12, Del Rey

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• I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

  Anne Lamott

  Jobs, Real, Track

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• A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

  Ian Mcewan

  Years, Childhood, Twenties

  Ian McEwan, Ryan Roberts (2010). “Conversations with Ian McEwan”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

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• 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

  Years, Age, Twenties

  Lysander Spooner (1886). “A Letter to Grover Cleveland on His False Inaugural Address, the Usurpation and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People”

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• When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.

  Harry S. Truman

  Gun, Hype, Honor

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• At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

  Orson Welles

  Birthday, Twenties, Permanent

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• If you just warn people, they often simply ignore you. But if you ask them a question, then they have to think about it. And once they start to think about the consequences, they almost always calm down. Unless they're drunk, of course. Or stoned. Or aged between fourteen and twenty-one. Or Glaswegian.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Thinking, People, Drunk

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• When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

  Samuel Johnson

  Time, Age, Twenties

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.375

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• 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

  Life, Change, Believe

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