Twenty One Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• My fans like to be romantic. I feel like I'm creating at least at the same level or even a higher level of creativity than I was at twenty-one. I've gotten better as an artist.

  Talib Kweli

  Creativity, Artist, Creating

  Interview with Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. April 7, 2013.

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• 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

  Long, Twenties, Levels

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• As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it's happening

  John Lennon

  Inspirational, Two, Creating

  John Lennon, Yōko Ono, David Sheff, G. Barry Golson (1981). “The Playboy interviews with John Lennon and Yōko Ono”, Putnam Pub Group

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• 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

  Years, Two, Gentleman

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Susan Brownell Anthony (1872). “Memorial of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Elizabeth L. Bladen, Olympia Brown, Susan B. Anthony, and Josephine L. Griffing, to the Congress of the United States, and the Arguments Thereon Before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate”, p.19

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• My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Father, Adventure, Twenties

  "The Coming Race" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Ch. 1, 1870.

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• 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

  Baseball, Past, Thinking

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• 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 at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

  Margaret Atwood

  Suicide, Running, Years

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• 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

  Twenties, Hiroshima, Happened

  FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from Apr 22, 2015

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