Birthdays Quotes

“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.”
― Robert Frost

“I was born on the night of Samhain, when the barrier between the worlds is whisper-thin and when magic, old magic, sings its heady and sweet song to anyone who cares to hear it.”
― Carolyn MacCullough, Once a Witch

“You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.”
― Bob Hope

“…tomorrow was her birthday, and she was thinking how fast the years went by, how old she was getting, and how little she seemed to have accomplished. Almost twenty-five and nothing to show for it.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Birthdays are nature's way of telling you to eat more cake.”
― Jo Brand

“People are so lonely, they spend their birthdays on the Internet, thanking people for wishing them a happy birthday, people who only know it’s their birthday because Facebook told them.”
― Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies

“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'

All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:

There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!

Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I don’t make to-do lists, but if I did, today’s would have gone something like this: 1. get drunk, 2. get laid, 3. go surfing (not necessarily in that order.) Noticeably absent from the list: get arrested. And yet here I am, spending my eighteenth birthday with my back against the wall of the Colonel’s hunting cabin, two FBI agents prowling the dark with their guns drawn, both trying to get me to confess to the murder of my friend Preston DeWitt.”
― Paula Stokes, Liars, Inc.

“Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer.

Glen had been born on the day after Christmas.

"My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained.

But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.”
― Augusten Burroughs, You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“Birthday Soup is good to eat, but not as good as Birthday Cake.”
― Else Holmelund Minarik, Little Bear

“And the news got worse. It appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that.”
― Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story

“They all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn't common in our compound, and there are more smiles on their faces than I've ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I'm not one of them. For these moral humans, birthdays are a kind of countdown to the end, the ticking clock of a dwindling life. For me, birthdays are notches on an infinite timeline. Will I grow tired of parties one day? Will my birthday become meaningless? I imagine myself centuries from now, maybe at my three-hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my seventeenth. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother's eyes? The swiftness of Uncle Antonio's steps as he dances? The way my father stands on edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his?

The scene shifts and blues in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I've known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty, bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine Little Cam deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows.

Forever.”
― Jessica Khoury, Origin

“Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers

“Birthday is the day to take a pause and live the day for yourself. It’s a day to look back at the miles (years) walked so far and plan the next miles of dreams to change your life and others too.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Slate

“You can tell you're getting old when the heat blast from your birthday cake candles feels hotter than the surface of the sun.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I don't mind getting older; it's a privilege denied to so many! - Chris Geiger”
― Chris Geiger, Bad Cells

“Birthdays are a day for being grateful that someone exists. We shouldn’t take it for granted. What if they died tomorrow? They could. Anyone could. We should say what we want without fear of it being taken the wrong way.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“...what could be more vexing than to be feted on his birthday when he wants nothing so much as to retreat in solitude to ponder the approach of his own mortality?”
― Richard T Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

“This year I turn 40, still single, but filled with a sense of wholeness and completeness that I have never felt before. I am unafraid to chase my passions, pursue my dreams, and conquer even the tallest of mountains.”
― Yvonne Padmos

“I have two wishes: something true somewhere and someone true sometime.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We are doomed, but fortunately, there are holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries that help. We never want to love. We only love, so thank God for dates that make us want.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Mom says you get two birthdays. The first one is the day you are born. The second one is the day you leave home and give birth to yourself.”
― Asha Bromfield, Hurricane Summer

“Even If It Is My Last Day, The World Should Never Fail To Celebrate My Birthday.”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Birthdays!!! Full of Energy, Excitement, Fervour & Pleasure. A day to be content of course as you needn't some other explanations, Being the Biggest One by Yourself. Appreciate in light of the fact that you are One of every Billions, who Survived, Assembled and became what you are Today. Contribute and make your Reality much Commendable, to be Cheerful for other people. Have a Greatest Birthday Today!!!”
― Manish Kejriwal

“When you reach our age, everyone wants to keep you alive with granola.  Consider this breakfast an act of liberation.  I got greasy egg sandwiches, bacon, and hash browns.”
― Circa24, Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.

“Hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays”
― J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and ... gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue!”
― Alice Sola Kim, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers

“As if being twelve would change anything.”
― Juliana Brandt, The Wolf of Cape Fen