Thursday Thirteen

1. Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun. ~ Kent Nerburn

2. August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor. ~ Henry Rollins

3. Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity. ~ Henry Rollins

4. Woodstock happened in August 1969, long before the Internet and mobile phones made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It was a time when we weren't able to witness world events or the horrors of war live on 24-hour news channels. ~ Richie Havens

5. Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February. ~ Michael Dirda

6. Though my conduct on the 10th of August 1792 was the act of my life of which I have most reason to be proud, I will here merely do homage to the worthy martyrs of the national sovereignty and the sworn laws, who, while they supported constitutional royalty, manifested the highest degree of republican virtue. ~ Marquis de Lafayette (The Insurrection of 10 August 1792 was a defining event of the French Revolution.The storming of the Tuileries Palace by the National Guard of the Paris Commune and fédérés from Marseille and Brittany caused the fall of the French monarchy.)

7. I can recall back in 1998, in August of that year, when we had a horrible disaster along the Mexican border in the town of Del Rio. At the time, FEMA was the shining star of the federal government. It's now perceived as many to be the dullest knife in the drawer. Right or wrong, that's the perception. ~ Henry Bonilla

8. In August most of Europe goes on holiday. ~ Tony Visconti

9. I kept having the producers of 'Fog in August' take out some of the Nazi terms and phrases. I don't want audiences to look at this doctor and say, 'He is a Nazi monster' and think that it has nothing to do with our lives today. ~ Sebastian Koch

10. On Sunday August 5, 2012, I was among a group of people who witnessed the Rover landing on Mars in real time at NASA's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. ~ Ahmed Zewail

11. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. ~ Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

12. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. ~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

13. The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. ~ Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 564th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.