Thursday Thirteen

Out of ideas today, so I'm going to take 13 quotes from books on the top shelf, using the 13th line on the 13th page as a sort of anchor:

1. "Jefferson had no way of knowing that immediately after he wrote those orders, one of the Barbary States would commence hostilities." - The Savage Wars of Peace, by Max Boot

2. "Most of the black people in Hope lived near the cemetery, across the road from where my grandfather's store had been." - My Life, by Bill Clinton

3. "Beat writers like Ginsberg shaped their public utterances out of the private experiences which their first readers found shameful and appalling: they presented, often as visionary experiences, confidences of a kind which were once uttered only to priest or doctor." - From "Introduction" in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition, Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair, eds.

4. "Hiawatha aimed his arrow at a little rabbit." From "Hiawatha" in Walt Disney's Storyland (55 Favorite Stories).

5. "The men left in a rush: they flung on coats, they slid kisses at everybody's cheeks, they slammed house doors, they slammed car doors; they ground their cars' starters till the motors caught with a jump." - An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard (page 15 because page 13 was a blank chapter page).

6. "We bend over them, Walt, taking their breath
    soft on our faces, wiping their domed brows,
     stroking black the coal-black Union hair." - From "Nurse Whitman," in Satan Says, by Sharon Olds

7. "The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the lease perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration." - From "Ms. Found in a Bottle," in Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

8. "People would listen to what you had to say and treat your views with respect, and if they disagreed with your point of view, they would explain why by providing intelligent reasons." - The Thinker's Way: 8 Steps to a Richer Life, by John Chaffee, Ph.D.

9. "Suddenly they discover their families - previously people to be ignored in the face of the seventies - pre-television, pre-automobile, pre-flight individuals who endured and survived the incredible task of total self-sufficiency, and came out of it with a perspective on ourselves as a country that we are not likely to see again." - From "Introduction," The Foxfire Book, by Eliot Wigginton and his students (eds.)

10. "After sorting through enormous piles of transcription pages, I selected interview material that best illustrates the important lessons, sacrifices, and conflicts about being a woman with a passion to create in this culture and at this time in history." - The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women, by Gail McMeekin

11. "The amount of sugar in your blood is one teaspoonful." - Folk Medicine: A New England almanac of natural health care, by D. C. Jarvis, M.D.

12. "If you recall wondering about things as a child, if you daydream occasionally, if you find yourself creating a story out of something that happened to you for the entertainment of your listener, you can develop - through the exercises in this book - the ability to generate written words more easily, to express your ideas more authentically, to develop your own "voice" - that manner of expression unique to you." - Writing the Natural Way, by Gabriele Lusser Rico

13. "The claw tore open his mind, as it might have torn open a rabbit." The Dragon's Son, by Margaret Weis


I really need to clean out my book shelves. I can't believe I have these books in the same room, let alone on the same shelf.


Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here. I've been playing for a while and this is my 257th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.