Eighteenth Birthday Quotes

If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her eighteenth birthday, you can get out of bed.

My father always said I would do something big one day.‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me, after he’d had a few beers.‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’ And he was right, my old man. I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.

November 30th marks Luna Hale's eighteenth birthday. Time fucking flies - I remember when she was just a baby and we'd tap each other's noses and say beep beep.

On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.

Not fair? Oh, I'm sorry I get this lovely laptop computing device when all you get is the ability to walk, control your hands, and know you'll survive until your eighteenth birthday." Then the kid was going, "Uh, I didn't mean..." But Tad wasn't done yet. While the whole class watched in horror, he put his hands through the metal support braces on the arms of his wheelchair and forced himself to stand up. Then he took a shaky little step to the side, gestured toward the chair, and said, "Why don't you take a turn with the laptop? You can even have my seat.

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.

She shivered, then shook her head and closed her eyes. She had to pray before bed. It was her duty to pray. Only, after tomorrow, it wouldn’t be her duty anymore. Her father, Lord Vlad Dracula, the prince—or voivode—of Wallachia was coming for her on her eighteenth birthday. He had sent word two months before. Assuming he still lives.

I had loved him since the moment he’d taken the pudding from me. When my father had announced on Dez’s eighteenth birthday that he supported a match between us, I’d never been happier than I was in that moment. I was young. And stupid. When Dez had disappeared the very next day, I experienced a heartache that I thought would swallow me whole and never spit me out. He’d been more than a crush. He had been my best friend, my confidant and my world.

If tonight wasn’t going to be the night—one week after my eighteenth birthday, with a limo to ourselves and no curfew—when was?

Pink Balloons My name is Olivia King I am five years old My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist . She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand. "Here Livie, I bought this for you." She called me Livie. I was so happy . I'd never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloon wrapped around other kids wrist in the parking lot of Wal-Mart , but I never dreamed I would have my very own. My very own pink balloon. I was excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! i couldn't believe my mother bought me something! She'd never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours . It was full of helium and it danced and swayed and floated as I drug it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it in the bathroom , the closet , the laundry room , the kitchen , the living room . I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother's bedroom! My mothers Bedroom? Where I wasn't supposed to be? With my pink balloon... I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off her nose! She slapped me across the face as she told me how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never listened! She shoved me into the hallways and slammed the door, locking my pink balloon inside with her. I wanted him back! He was my best friend! Not her! The pink ribbon was still tied around my wrist so I pulled and pulled , trying to get my new best friend away from her. And it popped. My name is Eddie. I'm seventeen years old. My birthday is next week. I'll be big One-Eight. My foster dad is buying me these boots I've been wanting. I'm sure my friends will take me out to eat. My boyfriend will buy me a gift, maybe even take me to a movie. I'll even get a nice little card from my foster care worker, wishing me a happy eighteenth birthday, informing me I've aged out of the system. I'll have a good time. I know I will. But there's one thing I know for sure I better not get any shitty ass pink balloons!

She had hauled out Grandma O’Donnell’s crystal plates, the ones Gram claimed were hand-cut by our distant relatives in County Kerry during the potato famine. She also said Big Foot crashed her eighteenth birthday party.

On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble… There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread.

If I allow my gaze to travel higher-which I won't-I'll see the solid gold basketball charm on a chain that my mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday nestled in his coarse, whorled chest hair. My front teeth throb as the memory of the charm bangs against them.

Even Confined children deserve a chane of life. That's why there's a retrial on their eighteenth birthday. - The Chancellor You know none of them will be pardoned. We can't afford the resources - -Vice Chancellor RHodes

I’m hopelessly, irrevocably in love with you, June Bailey. The desperate, aching kind of love. The kind there’s no coming back from. The kind there’s no way out of. The kind that’s going to be the death of me one day. I fall more in love with June than I ever thought possible as we clutch each other in a moonlit graveyard on her eighteenth birthday, with my mother on my mind, and the scent of sweet desserts dancing in the air.

If you find true love and are married before midnight on your eighteenth birthday, you will be released from the vow.

Life is scary as hell, but I’d rather believe you were spared for a reason, maybe so that on your eighteenth birthday you could make a stupid, spoiled, Hollywood actor give up his heart and fall in love.

We had talked about taking a bus to Cincinnati on your eighteenth birthday. It was the only connection any of the three of us had to anywhere and we knew we needed to leave town. He probably didn't even have time to tell you that plan.

She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother’s blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb.

For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake. The sharp, chemical smell was nothing like the hazy syrup of my dreams; the two were as different as Carolina and Indian jasmine, separation and attachment. They could not be confused. Standing in the middle of the room, I located the source of the fire. A neat row of wooden matches lined the foot of the bed. They ignited, one after the next, a glowing picket fence across the piped edging. Watching them light, I felt a terror unequal to the size of the flickering flames, and for a paralyzing moment I was ten years old again, desperate and hopeful in a way I had never been before and never would be again. But the bare synthetic mattress did not ignite like the thistle had in late October. It smoldered, and then the fire went out. It was my eighteenth birthday.

You're beautiful, and I bet you..." He thought for a long moment and then he said, "I bet you another kiss on your eighteenth birthday, you are going to be beating guys off with a stick." "Another kiss?" I laughed and heard it echo back at me through the woods. "I haven't been kissed yet. How can there be-" Then it happened. I felt his tongue against my lips, and I panicked. What do I do? What do I do? I pulled away and exclaimed, "I don't know how!" He chuckled and brought my head back to his. Then he showed me how.

Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn’t simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it’s pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty.

I was going to die. Eleven days after my eighteenth birthday. And even if Frank was able to end his brother's life before he ended Frank's, he still would've won. Henry still would've killed him, because Frank couldn't live without me any more than I could live without him. We were both about to die.

Not that I’ll be in school much longer. My eighteenth birthday is coming, and with it, conscription. I’m not apprenticed, I don’t have a job, so I’m going to be sent to the war like all the other idle ones. It’s no wonder there’s no work left, what with every man, woman, and child trying to stay out of the army.

Maybe Mikey is about to have his perfect life with kids and a wife and a rock band and everything he's ever wanted, while I'm dehydrated and tired and should be drinking water, but I'm not, I'm drinking coffee, spending seven dollars and sixty-eight cents to with myself a happy fucking eighteenth birthday that I'd forgotten all about.

...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?

It's decided then. I'm just going to lie here and have a little pity party for myself because who spends the night of their eighteenth birthday alone in their bedroom playing Angry Birds on a phone where the settings are all in Arabic, wearing a heart-shaped locket their mom gave them? Oh yeah, that's right, someone with no life. And no prospect of ever getting one.

She took a deep breath and it was her eighteenth birthday; it was Jess’s wedding and a summer evening at the pool; it was all those hundreds of times he’d been propped against her dorm building. And it was now, and she wanted to be this sophisticated, Audrey Hepburn-esque girl who gave him a coy smile and sauntered toward him, hips swinging. But this was Tam, and she wasn’t sophisticated for crap.

Twelve men. A virgin queen. One arranged marriage. The first time I met the boys of the Zodiac Brotherhood, I was forced to my knees for the introduction. Still grieving the death of my parents, I was a child queen, a pawn in my uncle’s agenda for wealth and gain. As my guardian, he had the authority to arrange a marriage upon my eighteenth birthday. That meeting took place six years ago. Now those boys are powerful men.

Seventeen year old Alexis finds herself on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. What generally means a step into adulthood instead opens its way to a terrifying truth about not only her family, but herself. She comes from a long line of vampire hunters, and her real dad wants her to carry on the family quest. At the same time, she is falling for a new boy at school who has his own secret. He is a vampire. Alexis is forced to make a decision from which there is no turning back.—Will she deny this newly discovered heritage, or embrace it.

Months later… I try my best to enjoy summer vacation, knowing that in a few weeks I’ll be heading into the last semester of my senior year. I should’ve graduated in June, but because Robbie and I moved around during my freshman year, I fell behind a semester. Even though I won’t graduate and walk across the stage until December, my eighteenth birthday is only a few weeks away. That’s when I’ll be forced to leave the house. After the fallout with Cain back in January, I haven’t heard from him other than the few times he came by with gifts and tried to see me.

Hey.’ Annabeth slid next to me on the bench. ‘Happy birthday.’ She was holding a huge misshapen cupcake with blue icing. I stared at her. ‘What?’ ‘It’s August eighteenth,’ she said. ‘Your birthday, right?’ I was stunned. It hadn’t even occurred to me, but she was right. I had turned sixteen this morning – the same morning I’d made the choice to give Luke the knife. The prophecy had come true right on schedule, and I hadn’t even thought about the fact that it was my birthday. ‘Make a wish,’ she said. ‘Did you bake this yourself?’ I asked. ‘Tyson helped.’ ‘That explains why it looks like a chocolate brick,’ I said. ‘With extra-blue cement.’ Annabeth laughed. I thought for a second then blew out the candle. We cut it in half and shared, eating with our fingers. Annabeth sat next to me and we watched the ocean. Crickets and monsters were making noise in the woods, but otherwise it was quiet. ‘You saved the world,’ she said. ‘We saved the world.’ ‘And Rachel is the new Oracle, which means she won’t be dating anybody.’ ‘You don’t sound disappointed,’ I noticed. Annabeth shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You got something to say to me, Seaweed Brain?’ ‘You’d probably kick my butt.’ ‘You know I’d kick your butt.’ I brushed the cake off my hands. ‘When I was at the River Styx, turning invulnerable … Nico said I had to concentrate on one thing that kept me anchored to the world, that made me want to stay mortal.’ Annabeth kept her eyes on the horizon. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Then up on Olympus,’ I said, ‘when they wanted to make me a god and stuff, I kept thinking –’ ‘Oh, you so wanted to.’ ‘Well, maybe a little. But I didn’t, because I thought – I didn’t want things to stay the same for eternity, because things could always get better. And I was thinking …’ My throat felt really dry. ‘Anyone in particular?’ Annabeth asked, her voice soft. I looked over and saw that she was trying not to smile. ‘You’re laughing at me,’ I complained. ‘I am not!’ ‘You are so not making this easy.’ Then she laughed for real, and she put her hands around my neck. ‘I am never, ever going to make things easy for you, Seaweed Brain. Get used to it.’ When she kissed me, I had the feeling my brain was melting right through my body.

Emily My sneakers hit the pavement and my heart slams like the truck door behind me. "Watch it!" My cousin and best friend Erick hops out of the drivers' side, reprimanding me at the same time. Sensitive about his truck. "Sorry," I mutter. The dim, enclosed parking garage puts me on edge. It's a perfect place for vampires. But it's early afternoon, not their prime hunting time. The upscale Austin, Texas, mall parking lot is packed with sedans and trucks. I sling a motorcycle helmet into the bed of the truck, where it joins the massive four-wheeler we just spent an exhilarating morning breaking in. A gift for his eighteenth birthday a couple of months ago. For my eighteenth, I'm getting a night

Hello, little man,’ I said and kissed his cheek. ‘Urgh.’ He wiped the kiss off. ‘I hate lipstick.’ I laughed as if he were joking and kissed him again. ‘You’ll love it when you’re older.’ ‘When I’m older,’ he asked, ‘will you be dead?’ Though there was nothing in his tone but interest, the question floored me completely. Stunned, I opened my mouth to reply, but could think of nothing to say. ‘The mum of one of the kids in Ben’s class is dead,’ Red said, his tone neutral. ‘Ever since he found out, he’s been obsessed.’ ‘Will you?’ Ben pressed. ‘Mummy will die when she’s old,’ his father answered, and I had to bite my tongue, because I knew better than anyone that death did not pre-book appointments decades in advance. Its approach was random, based on whimsy, often violent. I came from a line of women who bore a single child and were dead before its eighteenth birthday. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Red said.

in Jackson’s palm, as if it were a gift—Jackson was reminded of his biology teacher from school who would hand you something—a bird’s egg, a leaf—and make you explain it to him rather than the other way round. The rock was a dark ironstone that looked like petrified tree-bark, and sandwiched in the center of it was a seam of milky opal, like a hazy summer sky at dawn. A notoriously tricky stone to work, the old man informed Jackson. He had been looking at it for two weeks now, he said, another two weeks and he might be ready to start cutting it, and Jackson said that in another two weeks he would be in a remand prison somewhere, but the guy had a great lawyer and made bail and got away with a suspended sentence. A year later Jackson received a parcel addressed to him at the police station. Inside there was no note, just a box, and in a nest lined with midnight-blue velvet was an opal pendant, a little plaque of sky. Jackson knew he was being given a lesson by the old man, but it had taken him many years to understand it. He was keeping the pendant for Marlee’s eighteenth birthday.

Do you think she's going to hang out your dirty laundry for all to see?" "How can you say she has sense after what she pulled today? Bah! You don't know what you're talking about." "What Willow did today was nothing more than an act of rebellion, a way to let off steam and let you know, in the only way she knew how, that your treatment of her is entirely unacceptable." "Woman, what you need is a man, then maybe you wouldn't be putting your nose in everybody's business." "Why,Mr. Vaughn, are you applying for the job?" Miriam asked, with an ill-humored smile. "Hell,no!" "Then I suggest you leave my personal life out of this. My life is in perfect order, which is more than can be said for yours!" Owen grunted and took a pull on his pipe. Well aware of his bold perusal, Miriam attacked her darning as if it were infinitely more engaging than any conversation with the man across the room from her. Owen wasn't a handsome man by any standards with his bearlike build and ruddy complexion. And heaven knew he wasn't very likeable either. Thus, Miriam was at a complete loss to explain her powerful attraction to him. Good heavens, she thought, I haven't felt so giddy since that time on my eighteenth birthday when Hiriam pulled me behind Aunt Harriet's coachhouse and we... The landlady's face reddened.

There were four ways out of Nickel. One: serve your time. A typical sentence fell between six months and two years, but the administration had the power to confer a legal discharge before then at its discretion. Good behavior was a trigger for a legal discharge, if a careful boy gathered enough merits for promotion to Ace. Whereupon he was released into the bosom of his family, who were very glad to have him back or else winced at the sight of his face bobbing up the walk, the start of another countdown to the next calamity. If you had family. If not, the state of Florida's child-welfare apparatus had assorted custodial remedies, some more pleasant than others. You could also serve time by aging out. The schools showed boys the door on their eighteenth birthday, quick hand-shake and pocket change...Boys arrived banged up in different ways before they got to Nickel and picked up more dents and damage during their term. Often graver missteps and more fierce institutions waited. Nickel boys were f***** before, during, and after their time at the school, if one were to characterize the general trajectory... Three: You could die. Of 'natural causes' even, if abetted by unhealthy conditions, malnutrition, and the pitiless constellation of negligence. In the summer of 1945, one young by died of heart failure while locked in a sweatbox, a popular corrective at that time, and the medical examiner called it natural causes.

I am trying to stop being mystified. Important to concentrate on good hard facts. But which facts? One week before mu eighteenth birthday, on August 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire line in Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? In Delhi, Prime Minister Shastri announced “massive infiltration…to subvert the state:; but here is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, with his riposte: “We categorically deny any involvement in the rising against tyranny by the indigenous people of Kashmir”.

Upon my eighteenth birthday I was given three choices: 1. Join the church, and live at home. 2. Move out and live on my own. 3. Move into the single men’s home.

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.

image. It made masturbation mass murder. Pollen, which blew about in spring in quantities great enough to fur a pond in a coat of yellow, was an even larger, if less heart-wrenching, waste of life. While Nature was obviously prodigal of youth—in early eighteenth-century London, almost half the children died before their second birthday—this level of carnage was hard to accept.

By your eighteenth birthday you're supposed to know. They're supposed to tell you. Splicer. True Born. Laster.

Sure, she was going to turn eighteen in less than a year. She’d been in the system long enough to know that eighteenth birthdays weren’t marked by celebrations. When the checks stopped coming, she’d be on her own. “Aging out” of foster care meant becoming homeless. She’d heard stories of kids ending up in jail and hospital emergency rooms, selling drugs, living on welfare and food stamps. How desperate did a person have to become before they broke the law to survive? For now, things were good, and she didn’t want to mess that up.

For as many as 25,000 other children who reach their eighteenth birthdays each year, the emotions are similar. But there is a defining difference. These are young people who step through a doorway into a world full of unknowns, without the connections and supports that other children take for granted. Something has happened in their lives that forever makes them different: Usually through no fault of their own, they were taken away from their families and placed in foster care.1 They entered a bureaucratic system peopled with strangers who had complete control over where they lived, where they went to school, and even whether they ever saw their families again. The supports in their lives were not people who loved them, but people who were paid for the roles they played—caseworkers, judges, attorneys, and either shift workers in group homes or a succession of often kind, but always temporary, foster parents. In most states, on the day that a child in foster care turns eighteen, these supports largely disappear. The people who once attended to that child’s needs are now either unable or unwilling to continue; a new case demands their time, a new child requires the bed. There is often no one with whom to share small successes. And with no one to approach for advice, garden-variety emergencies—a flat tire, a stolen wallet, a missing birth certificate—escalate into full-blown crises.

The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until his or her eighteenth birthday. The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they’re old enough to appreciate the consequences—they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in sociology. What they want most of all is to sample the pleasures of adulthood, like sex or booze or cigarettes.

She took that envelope and was very careful with it. The agreement was they were going to give that piece of paper to my child. It would become part of his file and on his eighteenth birthday it would be made available to him. When people make promises to you and you don’t have a way of verifying, it gives people a lot of latitude to do or not do what they’ve promised. She promised me, and that was my promise to my child: “You get to know your history—you’re not someone that I’m ashamed of, you’re not bad, you did nothing wrong.” I told him I loved him with all my heart, I did the best I could, I wished I could be with him, and I would think about him every day that I drew breath. I

Not only have I been an old maid since my eighteenth birthday, but I'm driving the bandwagon for old maids of America. I might even start an Alliance. Of course, there will be a four-cat minimum for admittance into to organization. Bonus points if you live with your mother. A spot on the board if she happens to be a battle-ax that prefers pond scum sleeping next to her at night.

Hell, courtesy of his eighteenth birthday, his petty criminal record had been wiped clean. Nobody in Chicago had even considered trying a fourteen-year-old white boy with curly blond hair as an adult for a string of grocery and convenience store beer thefts. He was just a boy to them, being a boy.

Jamie held it all back, headed to school, and then broke down during her first class and ran out of the room.  At the time, she’d despised her father for killing himself on her eighteenth birthday. Now, she saw it with more clarity. Her mum had denied him the chance to talk to her, to see her, to be a part of her life during those last months. And he couldn’t take it.  The post-mortem report said that his blood-alcohol level was high enough to give an average male alcohol poisoning and possibly brain damage, and ruled that an investigation be launched to determine whether he had shot himself, or whether it had been staged, as they weren’t sure that anyone could even stay conscious, let alone lift a gun with any conviction, after drinking that much. Several character reports testified that he wasn’t an average male, and he was very well-practised at both while being shit-faced drunk. It was deemed suicide and never contested.  Her

What is the claiming?" Aidan let his breath out slowly. "Alexandria..." There was hesitation in his voice. She stepped away from him, her chin rising. "I guess there's a lot you haven't told me. Am I expected to have a child? A girl? What are the odds that my child will live?" He reached out, framing her face in his large hands. "I do not want you for a breeder for my race, piccola. I want you for myself. I do not know the odds that our child will survive. Like you, I can only pray. We will have to cross that bridge when we come to it." "So we have a girl, she survives her first year and grows up. What happens then?" Her sapphire eyes were steady on his golden ones. "All female children are claimed on their eighteenth birthdays. The males come from all over to meet the girl. If the chemistry is right, she is claimed by the male." "That is barbaric. Like a meat market. She has no chance at living any kind of life for herself." Alexandria was shocked. "Carpathian women are raised to know they hold the fate of their lifemate in their hands. It is their birthright, as is bearing the children." "No wonder the poor girl ran away. Can you imagine facing a life with that man at such an early age? How old is he? To her he must seem ancient. He's a man, for heaven's sake, not a boy. He's tough and probably cruel, and evidently he knows more about every subject under the sun than anyone alive.

The set of friends that surrounded me ranged from a girl who received a Porsche wrapped in pink ribbons for her eighteenth birthday to someone who was ecstatic that he had made enough money to buy marijuana for his mother as a birthday present.

Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.

Thomas Hansen, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Hinckley, carried a gun in the trunk of his car, and wrote letters to one of the stars of the musical Annie, pleading with the girl to return his love, warning her to stop drinking (he’d seen a newspaper photo of her next to a bottle of champagne, celebrating her eighteenth birthday), and informing her that he would commit suicide if she didn’t permit him to visit. Hansen had been tracking the girl for six years—since the time she was twelve—following her across the United States.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

I was walking all along just going for a walk outside after the party, I just felt good, I didn’t know if I wanted to sing, dance, and or cry; I was that happy getting to be with Marcel, so I went to my spot in the old car in the junkyard. I have to jump the face and rip my tank top or something like that yet it worth it, to see my dream car, sitting there I not a girlie girl but I love this cute thing it's sex looking like me. I found this old car at colleen’s junkyard it like right next door, I freak’n loved this old piece of crap, I even had sex with myself in the back seat, I took the old hood ornament off myself and keep it, my dad said it was off of Neveah’s dad's car, yet it was given to my mom and that why it just sitting outside for all the kids like me to rip the parts off of and sell on eBay. My stepmom hated Kristen, my real mother, so that is why the car ended up where it’s at, it was passed down yet the step-monster made sure I would never have it. My stepdad said the emblem is of a 1950 Nash that I found, little did I know it doesn’t go on that car yet, I think it’s a good fit, I was getting the car on my eighteenth birthday- I freaked up and had to die, just like me in the graveyard we both are retreating away. My stepdads had the 1950 Nash which he said was the first real sports car and it’s all steel, so I put it back on without him knowing that I did, funny maybe that's why I passed doing something like that… it was like it was meant for that car, or so he said and I did also. There is an old fender off what likes to be some old ford over there too that is rusty red, I am not sure of the year it’s too damn old for me to know. I remember right my dad said that grand-ma Nevaeh went to school in something like a 1965 Cadillac Deville convertible, yet, I don’t see that she had like nothing, I don’t know what that thing is. Like with these old cars, don't think you have a seat belt, you just cracked your head off the dash of the Nash and then they wiped it off, and sold it to some other poor ass hole.

Enchun, today is your eighteenth birthday. You’re now a grown-up. We know that from the time you were little you have loved the Lord. Surely you are willing to tell Jesus with your own voice that you long to be his child, and with your own voice will ask the

Enchun, today is your eighteenth birthday. You’re now a grown-up. We know that from the time you were little you have loved the Lord. Surely you are willing to tell Jesus with your own voice that you long to be his child, and with your own voice will ask the Lord Jesus to forgive you your sins.

for my eighteenth birthday: a pair of Avett Brothers concert tickets. I cried when she gave them to me, thinking

Remember the first time, Red? Your eighteenth birthday. When I made you come with my hand in your bedroom while your parents were downstairs? Remember that? It was just like this, wasn’t it?

A laugh burst free of my throat. “I didn’t mean it like that.” “How old are you?” he asked. “Thirteen. My birthday is March eighteenth.” He nudged his glasses up. “You’re in eighth grade?” “Yeah. You?” Elliot nodded. “Same.” He looked around the empty space, surveying. “What do your parents do? They work in the city?” I shook my head, chewing my lip. Without realizing it, I had really enjoyed talking

If you can cast a fifth-tier spell before your eighteenth birthday, no matter how you got there, you’re qualified to be a junior squire.

Jacques could not be the one to take Rand’s life. He just couldn’t. Warmth flooded her mind, and his arm tightened protectively around her. There is no need for me to hunt Rand should he prove to be the vampire preying on our people. The others can take care of it. We can go far from this place if that is your desire, my love. If Rand was the vampire, the betrayer, Jacques would have more reason than anyone to want to ruthlessly destroy him. Yet she could not bear the idea. Thank you, Jacques. I don’t want you to be the one to take his life if it really comes to that. Let us go to Byron, and I will do as I promised. Then we will find a place to rest. Shea nodded, her head brushing his chest. She could hear the reassuring beat of his heart, feel the heat in his body rising to meet hers. He was solid and real, and she owed it to both of them to take things slowly and make rational decisions. Right at this moment, Shea was not certain she was capable of such a thing. Her brilliant brain seemed to be malfunctioning lately. “We go to Byron, healer--do you follow?” Jacques asked. Gregori reluctantly left Raven to Mikhail. A woman could not possibly be claimed before her eighteenth birthday. Every moment of the healer’s existence would be an endurance test, living in hell until the child came of age. He would hunt and feed and resist the kill unless he was called on to dispense justice. That would be the most dangerous of all times, walking away from the power of taking a life.

We go to Byron, healer--do you follow?” Jacques asked. Gregori reluctantly left Raven to Mikhail. A woman could not possible be claimed before her eighteenth birthday. Every moment of the healer’s existence would be an endurance test, living in hell until the child came of age. He would hunt and feed and resist the kill unless he was called on to dispense justice. That would be the most dangerous of all times, walking away from the power of taking a life.

Cruz appeared to be a law-abiding citizen on his eighteenth birthday, giving him the right to buy a gun. But there was another way for the authorities to prohibit him from doing so. If Cruz had been involuntarily institutionalized under Florida’s Baker Act, then he would have undergone intensive psychiatric evaluation. If a psychiatrist had deemed Cruz to be a danger to himself or others, that doctor could have recommended that a judge adjudicate Cruz as mentally defective and unfit to own a firearm.

Antibiotics will frequently kill mitochondria along with the bacteria. In fact, the antibiotics that we have been giving unnecessarily may be a major cause not only of CFS, but the increase in many other diseases and new diseases as well. There was recently a study published that showed that women who had received eight or more doses of antibiotics before their eighteenth birthday had a dramatic increase in breast cancer.

Today was my eighteenth birthday, and I had dedicated a great deal of the intervening years between the age of five and now to trying to understand the motives of human cruelty.  I came to a conclusion that there wasn’t always a reason somewhere between eight and ten.

At fourteen years old, your first love is always going to be a disaster, but I didn’t have just one, I had three. All of them older than me, smarter than me, and completely out of my reach. But that didn’t stop me from following them around for the next four years.  I bided my time, waited for them, let them run havoc, fucking endless amounts of whores, but that stops now. Tonight is my eighteenth birthday and there is only one thing I want.

Here, I was home and I was safe. We were stronger together. Three years—three years since they first took me. Not that long after my eighteenth birthday and I had no idea any of this was possible. The dream I didn’t dare have.

Not when the old wolf had given his granddaughter their family’s heirloom sword after centuries of promising it to Sabine only upon his death. The blade had called to Danika on her eighteenth birthday like a howl on a moonlit night, the Prime had said to explain his unexpected decision.

My mother took her own life the day after my eighteenth birthday—sleeping pills and a steady stream of carbon monoxide courtesy of her champagne-gold Aston Martin. I realized then that it didn’t matter how strong a person was, how resistant they were to criticism and judgment—life could still wear a person down if they weren’t in their own driver’s seat.

My name is Olivia King I am five years old. My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot-pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist. She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand. “Here, Livie, I bought this for you.” She called me Livie. I was so happy. I’d never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloons wrapped around other kids’ wrists in the parking lot of Walmart, but I never dreamed I would have my very own. My very own pink balloon. I was so excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! I couldn’t believe my mother bought me something! She’d never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours. It was full of helium, and it danced and swayed and floated as I pulled it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it into the bathroom, the closet, the laundry room, the kitchen, the living room. I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother’s bedroom! My mother’s Bedroom? Where I wasn’t supposed to be? With my pink balloon… I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off of her nose. She slapped me across the face and reminded me of how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never listened! She shoved me into the hallway and slammed the door, locking my pink balloon inside with her. I wanted him back! He was my best friend! Not hers! The pink ribbon was still tied around my wrist so I pulled and pulled, trying to get my new best friend away from her. And it popped. My name is Eddie. I’m seventeen years old. My birthday is next week. I’ll be the big One-Eight. My foster dad is buying me these boots I’ve been wanting. I’m sure my friends will take me out to eat. My boyfriend will buy me a gift, maybe even take me to a movie. I’ll even get a nice little card from my foster-care worker, wishing me a happy eighteenth birthday, informing me I’ve aged out of the system. I’ll have a good time. I know I will. But there’s one thing I know for sure. I better not get any shitty-ass pink balloons!

Good and evil sometimes blur just like black and white, leaving us in the gray. It doesn’t matter if he’s going to heaven or hell because the night of my eighteenth birthday, I decided I’d be right by his side, happy to live in the gray as long as I have him.

Mama Fina insisted on celebrating Julia's eighteenth birthday before she left the family home. She wanted to mark the occasion, not only because Julia had come of age but above all because her granddaughter was about to start life as part of a couple, and without getting married first. It wasn't a question of propriety as far as Mama Fina was concerned. She understood that the younger generation had made freedom in love their credo. But she was convinced that one's choice of partner was a fundamental decision that necessarily involved a change of identity. This change was not confined to a new name, as people were inclined to believe. It involved primarily a transformation in the personality of each partner. To become one with another through love required a process of reflection. And the ceremony, the vows, the preparations, the family gathering - all of it helped construct this new identity. From experience, Mama Fina believed that words exchanged at crucial moments of life worked in a mystical way, as shields against adversity or catalysts for doubt and difficulty. She would have liked Julia and Theo to have this time for reflection, not so they would have the opportunity to back out but so they could become grounded.

reality when we are alone in your rooms without any witnesses … this dream is alone for you to know.” As Pakula notes, Vicky intelligently treated these fantasies (which continued until Willy turned seventeen) lightly in her answering letters, trying to direct her son’s passion toward his Hessian cousins. Just after their son’s eighteenth birthday, in 1877, Vicky and Fritz sent Willy to the University of Bonn. Both parents fervently hoped some of that institution’s accumulated centuries of academic merit might rub off on the future emperor. The experience would instead

My bedroom looked very different the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It looked lonely. I opened my eyes just as the sun started creeping through the window, and I stared at the white chest of drawers that had greeted me every morning since I could remember. Maybe it’s stupid to think that a piece of furniture had feelings, but then again, I’m the same girl who kept my tattered old baby doll dressed in a sweater and knitted cap so she wouldn’t get cold sitting on the top shelf of my closet. And this morning that chest of drawers was looking sad. All the photographs and trophies and silly knickknacks that had blanketed the top and told my life story better than any words ever could were gone, packed in brown cardboard boxes and neatly stacked in the cellar. Even my pretty pink walls were bare. Mama picked that color after I was born, and I’ve never wanted to change it. Ruthis Morgan used to try to convince me that my walls should be painted some other color. ‘Pink’s just not your color, Catherine Grace. You know as well as I do that there’s not a speck of pink on the football field.’ There was nothing she could say that was going to change my mind of the color on my walls. If I had I would have lost another piece of my mama. And I wasn’t letting go of any piece of her, pink or not. Daddy insisted on replacing my tired, worn curtains a while back, but I threw such a fit that he spent a good seven weeks looking for the very same fabric, little bitsy pink flowers on a white -and-pink-checkered background. He finally found a few yards in some textile mill down in South Carolina. I told him there were a few things in life that should never be allowed to change, and my curtains were one of them. So many other things were never going to stay the same, and this morning was one of them. I’d been praying for this day for as long as I could remember, and now that it was here, all I wanted to do was crawl under my covers and pretend it was any other day. . . . I know that this would be the last morning I would wake up in this bed as a Sunday-school-going, dishwashing, tomato-watering member of this family. I knew this would be the last morning I would wake up in the same bed where I had calculated God only knows how many algebra problems, the same bed I had hid under playing hide-and-seek with Martha Ann, and the same bed I had lain on and cried myself to sleep too many nights after Mama died. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day considering I was having such a hard time just saying good-bye to my bed.

my parents, Tully and Belinda Bloom. I haven’t seen them since police locked me up in juvenile detention as a tenth grader for helping myself to a pair of iPhones at the local Best Buy. I did it at their urging, palming items that could be pawned off to pay for their financial shortfalls. On parole themselves for a variety of offenses and fearful of what a “corrupting the morals of a minor” conviction might mean to their personal liberties, they swore to the court they had no prior knowledge of what I was doing, and I, too naive for my own good, said nothing to contradict their lies. It was my third offense in six months, a tipping point that landed me a three-month juvenile detention stint. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my parents’ own legal issues would make it unfeasible for me to be released back into their custody when I completed my initial sentence. So three months became six months. Which became a year. Which was extended until I reached my eighteenth birthday.

Was that where he…” She hesitated, unable to finish the question. “Died,” he said, finishing it for her. “That’s where he died. Yes.” “Did you see him before that?” “Once. On my eighteenth birthday.” The room was white, Dan thought. So white and lonely. Only the buzzing of the overhead light and the psychiatrist’s pen, clicking in and out, as they stared at the silent, shackled form of his older brother. A pale visage, deathly so. A form that didn’t move but simply existed, staring slack-jawed at the corner of the room. A form that whispered “I’m sorry” in an endless loop. It was a husk, a shade, and whatever lived inside was silent and still.