Tenth Birthday Quotes

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it? Is there icing on it? he'd said. Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. No, no, wait. Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in a wee house in the woods. Once upon a time there were three soldiers, tramping together down the road after the war. Once upon a time there were three little pigs. Once upon a time there were three brothers. No, this is it. This is the variation I want. Once upon a time there were three Beautiful children, two boys and a girl. When each baby was born, the parents rejoiced, the heavens rejoiced, even the fairies rejoiced. The fairies came to christening parties and gave the babies magical gifts. Bounce, effort, and snark. Contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. Sugar, curiosity, and rain. And yet, there was a witch. There's always a witch. This which was the same age as the beautiful children, and as she and they grew, she was jealous of the girl, and jealous of the boys, too. They were blessed with all these fairy gifts, gifts the witch had been denied at her own christening. The eldest boy was strong and fast, capable and handsome. Though it's true, he was exceptionally short. The next boy was studious and open hearted. Though it's true, he was an outsider. And the girl was witty, Generous, and ethical. Though it's true, she felt powerless. The witch, she was none of these things, for her parents had angered the fairies. No gifts were ever bestowed upon her. She was lonely. Her only strength was her dark and ugly magic. She confuse being spartan with being charitable, and gave away her possessions without truly doing good with them. She confuse being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it. She confused wit with intelligence, and made people laugh rather than lightening their hearts are making them think. Hey magic was all she had, and she used it to destroy what she most admired. She visited each young person in turn in their tenth birthday, but did not harm them out right. The protection of some kind fairy - the lilac fairy, perhaps - prevented her from doing so. What she did instead was cursed them. "When you are sixteen," proclaimed the witch in a rage of jealousy, "you shall prick your finger on a spindle - no, you shall strike a match - yes, you will strike a match and did in its flame." The parents of the beautiful children were frightened of the curse, and tried, as people will do, to avoid it. They moved themselves and the children far away, to a castle on a windswept Island. A castle where there were no matches. There, surely, they would be safe. There, Surely, the witch would never find them. But find them she did. And when they were fifteen, these beautiful children, just before their sixteenth birthdays and when they're nervous parents not yet expecting it, the jealous which toxic, hateful self into their lives in the shape of a blonde meeting. The maiden befriended the beautiful children. She kissed him and took them on the boat rides and brought them fudge and told them stories. Then she gave them a box of matches. The children were entranced, for nearly sixteen they have never seen fire. Go on, strike, said the witch, smiling. Fire is beautiful. Nothing bad will happen. Go on, she said, the flames will cleanse your souls. Go on, she said, for you are independent thinkers. Go on, she said. What is this life we lead, if you did not take action? And they listened. They took the matches from her and they struck them. The witch watched their beauty burn, Their bounce, Their intelligence, Their wit, Their open hearts, Their charm, Their dreams for the future. She watched it all disappear in smoke.

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.

Jeems was their body servant and, like the dogs, accompanied them everywhere. He had been their childhood playmate and had been given to the twins for their own on their tenth birthday.

Let’s see if I remember all of this—born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but raised in Salem by her mother, Susan, a teacher, and her father, Jacob, a police officer. Attended Salem Elementary School until your tenth birthday, when your father called into his station to report an unknown child in his house—” “Stop,” I muttered. Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life. “—but, bad luck, the PSFs beat the police to your house. Good luck, someone dropped the ball or they had other kiddies to pick up, because they didn’t wait around long enough to question your parents, and thus, didn’t pre-sort you. And then you came to Thurmond, and you managed to avoid their detecting you were Orange—” “Stop!” I didn’t want to hear this—I didn’t want anyone to hear it.

Your parents are weirdos, in the best possible way. They do not celebrate birthdays; never in your life have you received a present on the tenth of December. Instead, you are given books on the days that their authors were born.

Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my tenth birthday. I retreated to my room after an exhausting party and cuddled up with a teddy bear, but I found that it didn’t really work anymore, that whatever had once soothed me about this soft and silent creature no longer did. I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again—not really. Which was the first time I can remember feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return. Sarah Dessen once wrote that home is not a place but a moment. Home is a teddy bear, but only a certain teddy bear at a certain time.

I recalled phases of my life by what was on a plate: the crispy baked potatoes on seaside holidays in Devon, the lurid, sticky jam tarts of my tenth birthday, the roast chicken of every Sunday night, bathing the dread of the school week in gravy. No matter how terrible life became, no matter how blistering the pain, I was always sure I’d still have room for seconds.

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out.

This brings up the question of how much the people living in a dark age would even realize it. If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE,* did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? Take a kid born in the United States in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. On his tenth birthday, the world was still mired in the effects of the crash. To that child, the privation and lowered sense of expectations felt normal; he had no experience or memory of anything else. His parents, however, likely felt that times had gotten tougher.

By three months old, 40 percent of infants watch screen media regularly; by two years, 90 percent do. By her third birthday, the average American child recognizes one hundred brand logos. The typical child is exposed to forty thousand screen ads per year. Children know the names of more branded characters than of real animals. By her tenth birthday, the average American child knows three hundred to four hundred brands. Research shows over and over that preschoolers will overwhelmingly think advertised products, branded products, are superior even when the actual contents are identical.

He held up a small piece of paper she recognized with a pang as being from the pink stationary set her grandfather had bought her for her tenth birthday. “‘I want to marry a man who will wear pink shirts because it’s my favorite color,’” he read aloud, and then he looked up at her. “Really? That’s your criteria?” “It seemed important when I was ten.” “Bouquet—pink gladioli tied with white ribbon,” he read from a torn piece of school notebook paper. “What the hell is gladioli? Sounds like pasta.” “Glads are my favorite flower.” She grabbed her clothes and went into the bathroom, closing the door none too softly behind her. When she emerged, he was still in bed and still rummaging through her childish dreams for her future. She watched him frown at a hand-drawn picture of a wedding cake decorated with pink flowers before he set it aside and picked out another piece of pink stationary. “‘If the man who wants to marry me doesn’t get down on one knee to propose,’” he read in a high-pitched, mock-feminine voice, “‘I’ll tell him no.’” “My younger self had very high standards,” she snapped. “Obviously that’s changed.” He just laughed at her. “Were you going to put all this into spreadsheet form? Maybe give the poor schmuck a checklist?” “Are you going to get up and go to work today or are you going to stay in bed and mock a little girl’s dreams?” “I can probably do both.

Brian. How do you handle it? Knowing what’s happening, what may happen to Fox?” “You know, I was nineteen when Sage was born.” In the language of a man settling in for a spell, he propped one work-booted foot on his knee. “Jo was eighteen. Couple of kids who thought we knew it all, had it all covered. Then, you have a kid of your own, and the whole world shifts. There’s a part of me that’s been worried for thirty-three years now.” He smiled as he said it. “I guess there’s just more parts of me worried when it comes to Fox. And truth? It pisses me off that he had his childhood, his innocence stolen from him. He came home that day, his tenth birthday, and he was never a little boy, not in the same way, again. Brian O'Dell The Hollow

You see, Miss Winnow…Roman has always been drawn to stories and words. Ever since he was a lad, sneaking into my library to steal books off the shelves. It’s why my mother-in-law gave him a typewriter for his tenth birthday, because he dreams of being a ‘novelist’. Of writing something that matters to others. It’s why he wanted to go to university and spend his hours doing nothing more than analyzing other people’s thoughts and trying to pen his own.

If you are a boy who has just had his tenth birthday, your next one seems an eternity away. That’s because the single year that stretches ahead amounts to 10 per cent of the time you have been on earth. It’s a different sensation when you turn 50, because the distance to your 51st birthday amounts to just 2 per cent of the time you have been alive. As you get older and more experienced, you start to think about how you allocate time.

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

Alric looked at Reuben. “Is he telling the truth? I can have him ripped apart by dogs, you know. I love dogs. We use them to hunt, but they aren’t allowed to actually take down or eat their quarry. Always thought that was a shame, you know? I think they would appreciate the opportunity. It could be fun too. We could just let these fools run and bet on how far they can get before the dogs catch them.” “I bet Horace doesn’t make it to the gate,” Mauvin said; then all heads turned to Reuben. Ellison looked at him, too, his face frozen in a tense, wide-eyed stare. “I wasn’t aware of any threat from Squire Ellison, Your Highness,” Reuben replied. “Are you sure?” Alric pressed, and flicked a small yellow leaf off Ellison’s shoulder. “We don’t have to use the dogs.” He smiled and tilted his head toward the Pickerings. “They’d love to teach them a lesson, you know. In a way they’re a lot like hunting dogs—they never get the chance to kill anyone either. Ever since they reached their tenth birthday, no one has been stupid enough to challenge them.” “I was, Your Highness,” Reuben said. That got a laugh from the Pickerings and the prince, although Reuben didn’t know why. “Yes, you did, didn’t you?” “That’s why you’re our friend,” Mauvin explained. “He didn’t know who we were,” Fanen pointed out. “He had no idea about the skill of a Pickering blade.” “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Reuben said. His blood was still up from the fight, and his mouth ran away with him. “If I thought you were there to harm the princess, I would still have fought you.” A moment of silence followed this and Reuben watched as Alric smiled; then he glanced at Mauvin and they laughed again. “Tell me, Hilfred, how are you at catching frogs?

recognize that many do not have that luxury and I respect the choices they have to make in similar circumstances. All I can do is encourage them to rejoin work if they truly wish to. One of my colleagues took a break for seven years when her children were very young and spent her time baking cakes and organizing birthday parties. Now back at work, she is one of our most valuable people. Another colleague from our finance team said that she needed to quit as her son was in the tenth standard in school and needed attention, but we convinced her to stay on and work only half-day for the next one year, till the exams were done with. On

I don't think I've ever met a girl with a bazooka for a pet." Hunter looked both amazed and slightly frightened. "That's Kitty," I said, pointing to the large weapon. "I got her for my tenth birthday.

Sang, change your birthday. Make it like a week later or something. The tenth. Or the fifteenth. Or fuck it. Make it next month. November's a nice birthday month. Have a November birthday." "Okay," I said, in a very enthusiastic tone.

On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too; which was how I understood the secret of my original hour of birth; and, having been expelled from one gang, I decided to form my own, a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows.

She'd been a Marvel superhero fan ever since her tenth birthday, when her father had given her his old-school comic book collection, the pages tattered and worn from use. Unlike Sanjay, who admired the superheroes for their otherworldly powers, Daisy loved how they were committed to saving the world, even though they were all broken inside.

would never, ever say it to their face—as mentioned, we are way above the Mommy Wars. But still. We think they have it easier. Every day while we are living our lives of servitude, they go to a place, in real clothes, where they are paid to sit comfortably among adults and think entire, complete, punctuated thoughts. Often this place has free coffee round the clock and cake on their birthdays. Yes, work is work, and no, not every day is a joyfest. But here is what I did not realize when I handed in my resignation at the community college and became a professional mom: if you work outside the home, for eight or so back-to-back hours every weekday, you wipe zero butts that do not belong to you. And to be clear, butt wiping is pretty much the easiest part of stay-at-home-mom work. I would gladly wipe ten more butts per day if it did away with even just the raisin-related tantrums. If it meant I didn’t have to stand outside in every kind of weather saying, “I see! I’m watching!” while one of a succession of toddlers does absolutely nothing of interest for the tenth time in a row. If you have a full-time job outside the home, that means that for eight solid hours every day, no one asks you to go down a wet slide or starts crying

espresso and tapas and it’s perfect for my current mood. As I walk along, pounding the hard pavement, a woman on roller skates burns past me, her white shirt billowing around like a puff of smoke as she elbows me out of the way. The roller skates remind me of Dad, and of clinging on to his hand as I attempted to balance on the pair of rainbow-coloured roller skates I got for my tenth birthday. Thinking of Dad makes me wonder what it must have been like for him all of those years ago. I ponder for a moment, and then after remembering what Sam said in the club, I pull my mobile out from my bag and scroll through the address book to find his number. ‘Hello darling, what a wonderful surprise. Is everything OK?’ His voice sounds worried. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ There’s an awkward silence. ‘I am at work,’ I reply, a little too sharply. ‘Well, I just popped out and … err, I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you the other day,’ I manage, trying to disguise the unease in my voice. ‘So how are you?’ I add, awkwardly. ‘I’m fine. A bit tired. Anyway, enough about me. It’s so nice to hear from you,’ he says, and for a moment it’s as though everything that’s gone on between us before has been forgotten in an instant. But then my back constricts. I start to feel as though calling him was a bad idea, and I realise that I’m just not ready to forget what he did to us … especially to Mum. ‘You know I was telling Uncle Geoffrey

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.

Jenny was barely sixteen when she died. I was five weeks short of my tenth birthday. Old enough to know that my life would never be the same. Too young to understand why.

message. Include information about a sale, or a new product. You just came across an article that says, “People who have hot tubs are so relaxed that they outlive poor slobs who do not have hot tubs.” Include that along with a friendly message about how you’re offering free delivery this week only! I follow all my clients on social media. I also save all of their birthdays in my calendar. The other day I noticed that Greta Lambert’s son James had just celebrated his tenth birthday. It was an opportunity for an easy, friendly follow-up message. I shot her an email, “Wow. James is growing up so quickly, your apartment must be feeling small.” Greta responded, “Ryan, good to hear from you, it does feel small!” Now she’s a warm lead and I’ll follow up next week with some listings in her area.

Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach. Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process. The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation. It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?

According to Palates of Personality—and before you object, yes it is a real book, and that is its title—a fondness for simberries indicates a spontaneous, impulsive personality. And also a preference for—” He cut off as a wadded-up piece of paper bounced off his forehead. He blinked. “Sorry,” Shallan said. “It just kind of happened. Must be all that impulsiveness and spontaneity I have.” He smiled. “You disagree with the conclusions?” “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve had people tell me they could determine my personality based on the day I was born, or the position of Taln’s Scar on my seventh birthday, or by numerological extrapolations of the tenth glyphic paradigm. But I think we’re more complicated than that.” “People are more complicated than the numerological extrapolations of the tenth glyphic paradigm?” Kabsal said, spreading jam on a piece of bread for himself. “No wonder I have such difficulty understanding women.” “Very funny. I mean that we’re more complex than mere bundles of personality traits. Am I spontaneous? Sometimes. You might describe my chasing Jasnah here to become her ward that way. But before that, I spent seventeen years being about as unspontaneous as someone could be. In many situations—if I’m encouraged—my tongue can be quite spontaneous, but my actions rarely are. We’re all spontaneous sometimes, and we’re all conservative sometimes.

by my tenth birthday I reached only twenty-four inches and weighed twenty pounds.

I read books by Hemingway, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald —you know, The Men™—all before my tenth birthday. This was really formative for me because it made me a pompous asshole and also caused some severe anxiety.

Yes,” said Papa, “and to me it doesn’t seem so very long ago. Of course we didn’t know then that we’d be spending your tenth birthday steaming about Lake Zurich as refugees from Hitler.” “Is a refugee someone who’s had to leave their home?” asked Anna. “Someone who seeks refuge in another country,” said Papa. “I don’t think I’m quite used to being one yet,” said Anna. “It’s an odd feeling,” said Papa. “You live in a country all your life. Then suddenly it is taken over by thugs and there you are, on your own in a strange place, with nothing.” He looked so cheerful as he said this that Anna asked, “Don’t you mind?” “In a way,” said Papa. “But I find it very interesting.

On the Thursday before her [tenth] birthday, Abby brought the classroom twenty-five E.T. cupcakes as a reminder. Everyone ate them, which she thought was a good sign. On Saturday, she forced her parents to drive to Redwing Rollerway an hour early so they could set up. By 3:15 the private party room looked like E.T. had exploded all over the walls. There were E.T. balloons, E.T. tablecloths, E.T. party hats, snack-sized Reese's Pieces next to every E.T. paper plate, a peanut butter and chocolate ice cream cake with E.T.'s face on top, and on the wall behind her seat was Abby's most treasured possession that could not under any circumstances get soiled, stained, ripped, or torn: an actual E.T. movie poster her dad had brought home from the theater and given to her as a birthday present. Finally, 3:30 rolled around. No one came.

On the Thursday before her [tenth] birthday, Abby brought the classroom twenty-five E.T. cupcakes as a reminder. Everyone ate them, which she thought was a good sign. On Saturday, she forced her parents to drive to Redwing Rollerway an hour early so they could set up. By 3:15 the private party room looked like E.T. had exploded all over the walls. There were E.T. balloons, E.T. tablecloths, E.T. party hats, snack-sized Reese's Pieces next to every E.T. paper plate, a peanut butter and chocolate ice cream cake with E.T.'s face on to, and on the wall behind her seat was Abby's most treasured possession that could not under any circumstances get soiled, stained, ripped, or torn: an actual E.T. movie poster her dad had brought home from the theater and given to her as a birthday present. Finally, 3:30 rolled around. No one came.