Thirteen Quotes

There was a point in school when I was, like, thirteen, that I didn't feel comfortable at all. ~ Rita Ora

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? ~ Truman Capote

In August 1867, a thirteen-year-old142 boy who had severely cut his arm while operating a machine at a fair in Glasgow was admitted to Lister's infirmary. The boy's wound was open and smeared with grime - a setup for gangrene. But rather than amputating the arm, Lister tried a salve of carbolic acid, hoping to keep the arm alive and uninfected. The wound teetered on the edge of a terrifying infection, threatening to become an abscess. But Lister persisted, intensifying his application of carbolic acid paste. For a few weeks, the whole effort seemed hopeless. But then, like a fire running to the end of a rope, the wound began to dry up. A month later, when the poultices were removed, the skin had completely healed underneath. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water. My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Goldene Haar!' he exclaims and takes one of my long braids into his hand. I am not certain I heard right. Did he say 'golden hair' about my braids?
Are you Jewish? The question startles me. 'Yes, I am Jewish.' How old are you?
I am thirteen.' 'You are tall for your age. Is this your mother?' He touches Mommy lightly on the shoulder. 'You go with your mother. ~ Livia Bitton-Jackson

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime. ~ Jay-Z

A year and a half had indeed made some changes in Veda's appearance. She was still no more than medium height, but her haughty carriage made her seem taller. The hips were as slim as ever, but had taken on some touch of voluptuousness. The legs were Mildred's, to the last graceful contour. But the most noticeable change was what Monty brutally called the Dairy: two round, swelling protuberances that had appeared almost overnight on the high, arching chest. They would have been large, even for a woman: but for a child of thirteen they were positively startling. Mildred had a mystical feeling about them: they made her think tremulously of Love, Motherhood, and similar milky concepts. ~ James M. Cain

I don't know what's going to happen to us. It's been almost thirteen years. You haven't moved on. I can't keep my hands off you and my heart is sick and fucking tired of trying. We have a lot of things to talk about, some of which are going to be an absolute dumpster fire. But I don't know how to stop loving you, Thea. I've tried. And tried. But here we are. Fucked up and in love."
My lip quivered. "Fucked up and in love. That's the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. ~ Aly Martinez

Jesus Christ, bro, what the hell were you doing in there? Shaving your legs? Thirteen-year-old girls take shorter showers than that!"

"I was literally in there for five minutes. ~ Elle Kennedy

Is it true it takes thirteen months for a female to carry and give birth?"
"Minimum." He said it with such casual dismissal that Bella laughed.
"That's easy for you to say. You don't have to lug the kid around inside of you all that time. You, just like your human counterparts, have the fun part over with like that." She snapped her fingers in front of his face.
His dark eyes narrowed and he reached to enclose her hand in his, pulling her wrist up to the slow, purposeful brush of his lips even as he maintained a sensual eye contact that was far too full of promises. Isabella caught her breath as an insidious sensation of heated pins and needles stitched its way up her arm.
"I promise you, Bella, a male Demon's part in a mating is never over like this." He mimicked her snap, making her jump in time to her kick-starting heartbeat.
"Well" - she cleared her throat - "I guess I'll have to take your word on that." Jacob did not respond in agreement, and that unnerved her even further. Instinctively, she changed tack. "So, what brings you down into the dusty atmosphere of the great Demon library?" she asked, knowing she sounded like a brightly animated cartoon.
"You."
Oh, how that singular word was pregnant with meaning, intent, and devastatingly blatant honesty. Isabella was forced to remind herself of the whole Demon-human mating taboo as the forbidden response of heat continued to writhe around beneath her skin, growing exponentially in intensit ~ Jacquelyn Frank

There are eleven or twelve or thirteen cities in China with populations of over 10 million people and most people in the West have never even heard of these cities. ~ Roger Corman

She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men's work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we're out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends. ~ Margaret Atwood

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years. ~ Diane Duane

At least 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Major battles numbered the dead in the thousands; even minor skirmishes killed hundreds...Then why study the death of thirteen men?... Mass death numbs the mind and heart as it numbers its vast toll. Relief from the horror is less possible when we watch old Joe Woods and thirteen-year-old David Shelton plead for life - and then die. ~ Phillip Shaw Pauadan

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed
thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes
because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself
and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud. ~ John Fowles

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years. ~ Niall Ferguson

The American Senate remained focused on domestic priorities and thwarted all expansionist projects. It kept the army small (25,000 men) and the navy weak. Until 1890, the American army ranked fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria's, and the American navy was smaller than Italy's even though America's industrial strength was thirteen times that of Italy. America did not participate in international conferences and was treated as a second-rank power. In 1880, when Turkey reduced its diplomatic establishment, it eliminated its embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. At the same time, a German diplomat in Madrid offered to take a cut in salary rather than be posted to Washington.18 ~ Henry Kissinger

I haven't said anything about your novel yet,' he said, taking a seat on the other side of the table. 'But it made an indelible impression on me. I was deeply shaken after reading it.'
'Why's that?' I asked.
'Because you went so far. You went so unbelievably far. I was glad you did, I was sitting here, smiling, because you had brought it off. When we met you wanted to be a writer. No one else had had the idea. Only you. And then you achieved it. But that wasn't why I was shaken. It was because you went so far. Do you really have to go that far, I thought at the time. And it was frightening. Speaking for myself, I can't go that far.'
'What do you mean? How do you mean I went so far? It's just a standard novel.'
'You say things about yourself it's unheard of to say. Not least the story of the thirteen-year-old. I'd never have thought you would dare. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

You have a wonderful child. Then, when he's thirteen, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment's peace. You have to hang in there, because two or three years later, the gremlins will return your child and he will be wonderful again. ~ Jill Eikenberry

My life felt heavy that night, with each year of my life like a weighty crate, so I had almost thirteen crates to carry around inside me, with each crate full of notebooks and each notebook full of secrets. It is hard to lug such a heavy load around with me and to keep everyone from seeing it. But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like dark, dark ink. I lived with this ink myself, emblazoned on my ankle for me to see each morning when I got out of bed, except for the days when I collapsed exhausted with my shoes on. But I did not want to stain anyone else's life. ~ Lemony Snicket

We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough.

She is so natural and soft. Her shoulders are down, hips loose and swinging as we close together. I swear I'm growing chest hair just looking at her. I've been a boy in public before, but I've never seen her like this. That's it exactly; I haven't seen her at all, except in glimpses, in half-confessional role-play sex. And here she is - pressed tight against my chest, hips grinding against my crotch to the bass bump of the music. Her thigh along mine is electric heaven. Two drag queens cannot decide whether we are breeders or in drag. I stroke my mascara-made mustache at them - but none of it matters with hands in suede and the way she smiles. ~ Various

It feels kind of strange knowing that I rule the whole planet of Naboo and I'm only thirteen. At first, my face - because it was really white - was a bit of a shock. But when the whole costume was put together and the headdress was put on, I really felt proud, like a Queen. ~ Keisha Castle-Hughes

There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer - today, around 90 percent of all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during their lifetimes. ~ Rebecca Skloot

I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen. ~ Kate Braverman

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall. ~ Max Lerner

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked. ~ Greg Nagan

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While ~ Fred Waitzkin

Palpatine, she has only just turned thirteen!" Palpatine spread his hands. "Naboo has elected younger Queens, m'lady. And hers could be a reign that will last fifty years. ~ James Luceno

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Thirteen years separate the death of her mother from that of her aunt.
And another thirteen passed between her mother's death and her grandmother's.
yes, exactly the same time lapse.
And all three died in almost exactly the same way.
A leap into the void.
Death has three different ages.
The girl, the mother, the grandmother.
So no age is worth living.
In the train that rolls toward the camp, Charlotte makes a calculation.
1940 + 13 = 1953.
So 1953 will be the year of her suicide.
If she doesn't die before that. ~ David Foenkinos

and exactly twenty-one feet from the ground. From there it fell about nine feet, culminating in a perfect hangman's knot, one that Seth had undoubtedly worked on for some time. The noose was straight from the textbook with thirteen ~ John Grisham

At thirteen, when I arrived in Hong Kong after leaving China, I made a living by working in a restaurant. ~ Martin Yan

A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen. ~ Adrian Tomine

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. ~ Mark Rothko

I have the window seat. In the two seats beside me are two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellowy-white hair and thick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipsticked bright red with bravado... They seem to me amazingly carefree. They have saved up for this trip and they are damn well going to enjoy it, despite the arthritis of one, the swollen legs of the other. They're rambunctious, they're full of beans; they're tough as thirteen, they're innocent and dirty, they don't give a hoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them, obligations, old hates and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like children, but this time without the pain. ~ Margaret Atwood

I'd been chunky in junior high, close to fat, so I knew what I was talking about. So that no teenager out there will get the wrong idea and go all anorexic on me, I was a size thirteen in jeans, and that was at five foot nothing. See, I really was chunky. I hate women who complain about being fat when they're like a size five. Anything under size five isn't a woman. It's a boy with breasts. I ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control. ~ David Foster Wallace

...when President Clinton, on the anniversary of his election, spoke in the church in Tennessee where Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered his last sermon. Inspired by the place and the occasion, he made one of the most eloquent speeches of his presidency. What would King have said, he asked, had he lived to see this day?

"He would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. This is not what I came here to do.

I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon; not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work, but not have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for."

After describing what his administration was doing to curb drugs and violence, the President concluded that the government alone could not do the job. The problem was caused by "the breakdown of the family, the community and the disappearance of jobs," and unless we "reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul and the truth of human nature, none of the ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

Thirteen," Dante murmured and I closed my eyes because I knew what was coming next. "I ~ Sloane Kennedy

A remarkably large number of Renaissance artists were illegitimate, including Alberti and Ghiberti. For them, as for Leonardo, this was both a curse and a blessing. Had he been born "legitimately," Leonardo would likely have followed in his father's footsteps and become a notary or a lawyer. But those professions' guilds refused entry to illegitimate children. Leonardo couldn't become a doctor or a pharmacist, nor could he attend university. By age thirteen, most doors were already closed to him. ~ Éric Weiner

I was diagnosed a thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She'd always been a very suspect type of librarian--I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don't care what anyone says.) ~ Francesca Zappia

Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right? ~ Catherynne M Valente

I was driving, which might have been unusual anywhere but here in the Kingdom of Hereford, which was unique in the Ununited Kingdoms for having driving tests based on maturity, not age. That explained why I'd had a license since I was thirteen, while some were still failing to make the grade at forty. ~ Jasper Fforde

My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada. All ~ Gary Paulsen

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them. Burning on my left hip: petticoat.

And near it, my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. I remember feeling that word, heavy and slightly sticky across my pubic bone. My mother's steak knife. Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself. Pouring bleach over the knife and sneaking through the kitchen to return it. Wicked. Relief. The rest of the day, I spent ministering to my ~ Gillian Flynn

Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there to depend on. Pa and Jack had gone, and Ma needed help to take care of Mary and the little girls, and somehow to get them all safely to the west on a train. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded - such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple, the coming of Christ to repair the mischief, his miracles and suffering, etc. When he had finished an Indian orator stood up to thank him.

'What you have told us,' says he, 'is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours.

'In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on, and if their hunting was unsuccessful they were starving. Two of our young hunters, having killed a deer, made a fire in the woods to boil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the Blue Mountains.

'They said to each other, "It is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiling venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her." They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it and said: "Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this place after thirteen moons, and you will find something that will be of great benefit i ~ Benjamin Franklin

To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was. ~ Umberto Eco

Polly Hall was thirteen but wore enough makeup to rival a 40-year-old whore. ~ Richelle Mead

Oh, my god," Augustus said. "I can't believe I have a crush on a girl with such cliche wishes."
"I was thirteen," I said again, although of course I was only thinking "crush crush crush crush crush". I was flattered but changed the subject immediately. ~ John Green

Mirad had asked for peace for his birthday.
Imagine, a boy of thirteen who asks for peace as a birthday present.
When I heard that I cried. ~ Ad De Bont

(Officially the earliest age was eleven for officers' sons and thirteen for the rest, but no one took much notice of the regulation - seven-year-olds were not unknown.) Before ~ Patrick O'Brian

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée's bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star's Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She'd never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I'd told every other woman I'd ever fallen for: "I'll make you a tape! ~ Rob Sheffield

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway.
He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, "Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished.
He said, "But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. "I have noticed that. ~ Wendell Berry

I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life. ~ S.A. Tawks

He shrugged. "I'll take it if that's all I can get. I'll do the same. I'll start. My parents died when I was thirteen. I was left with an older cousin as a guardian. I detested him. He died a year and a half later, and it was one of the best days of my life. I disliked my next guardian, my Aunt Mildred, but she was a saint compared to the first one. ~ R.K. Lilley

I can go back to my very first movie, Thirteen, and think about that exact moment when I saw Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood do their chemistry read audition together. It just came alive. I was filming it with a video camera and I was like, "I know I can make a good movie now." ~ Catherine Hardwicke

In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally - the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Everybody, listen!" he shouted to the far-off crowds. "Rundark has super-powerful magical bombs. And they will be headed straight toward those giant vision orbs you're watching. You need to get as far away from those orbs as possible!"
And all around the Thirteen Kingdoms, seven people turned away from the orbs and fled. Yes, that's right: seven. The thousands of others stayed glued to the action. They'd discovered a new form of moving-picture entertainment, and nothing was going to tear them away ~ Christopher Healy

If I had a dreamcatcher when I was thirteen, it would have spent many long days in the dryer. ~ Dana Gould

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script. ~ Steven Soderbergh

In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations ... If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa ... the independence movement in India ... ) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world. ~ Walter Wink

When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble. ~ Kevin Costner

I suppose I ought to describe my father, but it isn't easy. Sometimes over the years he seemed one thing and sometimes another. He was a good-looking man, strong and ruddy. When I was little he seemed tall to me, but by the time I was thirteen he had become medium. ~ Edith Konecky

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced. ~ Neal Barnard

I secretly hoped if Grim could enjoy happy hour on level thirteen, I was allowed to enjoy mind-blowing orgasms in Heaven. It was supposed to be paradise, right? ~ Tara West

When I started out playing guitar and singing, I was about twelve, going on thirteen. The role models for me back then were the folk singers. They all had these high, really nice voices and ranges, like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and then later, of course, Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt. I decided early on that I was going to learn how to write songs really, really well, because I didn't want to have to compete as a singer. I didn't feel that it was my strong point. ~ Lucinda Williams

I want people to see and hear the things I see and hear. And I want them to remember how it was when they were children. I don't want them to grow up entirely.
Every adult is the creation of a child. My own signature, that identifying scrawl required by parcel postmen and valued by a handful of comic-book fans, that signature was devised by a thirteen-year-old boy who thought I'd want to seem important one day. I am stuck with it. My life is the result of that boy's dreams and limitations, and of the company that boy kept a long time ago, back when things could still happen for the first time. ~ Chris Fuhrman

Miss Sedley was almost as flurried at the act of defiance as Miss Jemima had been; for, consider, it was but one minute that she had left school, and the impressions of six years are not got over in that space of time. Nay, with some persons those awes and terrors of youth last for ever and ever. I know, for instance, an old gentleman of sixty-eight, who said to me one morning at breakfast, with a very agitated countenance, 'I dreamed last night that I was flogged by Dr Raine.' Fancy had carried him back five-and-fifty years in the course of that evening. Dr Raine and his rod were just as awful to him in his heart then, at sixty-eight, as they had been at thirteen. If the Doctor, with a large birch, had appeared bodily to him, even at the age of threescore and eight, and had said in awful voice, 'Boy, take down your pants ... ' Well, well ... ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

I am, I think the only surviving member of the original Battle Creek church. The church was disbanded, with the exception of thirteen members, in 1870. ~ John Harvey Kellogg

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. ~ Brooks Brown

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God. ~ Junot Diaz

I liked sports real well myself. And when I was about thirteen, I thought I knew why. I looked at it this way. God put you in a body, and He made that body subject to a lot of natural laws, you know? Like gravity and stuff. You see, Doc, I was brought up very religious, and I believed in God. And I believed in a soul. And I got to thinking that maybe the soul was like a prisoner in the body. Maybe the soul was too big for the body and was always trying to get out. And sports was - well, according to natural laws, you should only be able to run so fast, right? I mean, you get your legs working, you get your muscles churning as fast as they can go, you take into account the wind against you, stuff like that, all natural and scientific, and then you know just how fast you can go. You see? But me, I figured that there was something inside you, inside your soul, that could make you go just a little bit faster. Just a little bit faster, and it didn't have anything to do with muscles or nature or anything. It was your soul doing it. And when your soul made you go just that little bit faster, well then, for that moment, you were free. Does that make any sense? ~ Paul Quarrington

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.
Even if the dogs are small. ~ E. Lockhart

here was a Baptist church near their house, and at age twelve or thirteen, Kayne began to walk to it and attend services on a regular basis. She told me that one Sunday during the altar call, "I was just so drawn. I want to do this. For some reason, I started crying, and a lady came back to where I was sitting-I didn't come down; she saw me where I was sitting and came back-and started talking to me. She said, `You want to go down?' and I said, `Yes.' So she walked with me. ~ Susan M. Shaw

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft."

PROLOGUE

The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar.

This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats.

First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility.

Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful.

Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama.

Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for.

Cosita would become a Drone! ~ Nick Hahn

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I didn't recognize it as such then, because I was only thirteen years old, but later I found it a bit ironic that my first time seeing a woman in all her form and glory and saggy drug-tainted tits, arrived at the same exact time as my first introduction to death. ~ Dave Matthes

From the way my mother's eyes lit up, I could guess she was wondering about a marriage between me and one of the Grand Duchess Miechen's sons. Never mind that the eldest, Kyril, was only thirteen. ~ Robin Bridges

I've been going to the same person for haircuts since I was thirteen. ~ Gia Coppola

My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster. ~ Octavia E. Butler

I'm done with girls on rocks! I've painted them for thirteen years and I could paint them and sell them for thirteen more. That's the peril of the commercial art game. It tempts a man to repeat himself. it's an awful thing to get to be a rubber stamp. I'm quitting my rut now while I'm still able. ~ Maxfield Parrish

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep. ~ Stanislaw Ulam

I have felt the highest of Joys and I have felt the true pit of sorrow – all in just thirteen hours. ~ C. David Murphy

I'm not saying this to upset you. I'm trying to tell you what you absolutely have to do. What if we were both dead?' asked Luke.
Elliot looked at his pudding and was very sad about his life and his choices. How had he wound up here, in a place where all he had was pudding - Elliot would have sold his soul for a chocolate bar - and awful people who at the age of thirteen asked questions like 'What if we were both dead. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Ryder's in jeans and his shirt from last night, and he's staring at the fridge. When I pad closer, I see he's not just staring at the door. I've hung my various ultrasound pictures to the silvery surface, and he's studying them. His index finger is poised over my recent twenty-week one, and he's tracing the outline of the baby's legs.

"Hi," I say, clearing my throat.

He straightens and then smiles. It's a sheepish look, as if he's been caught. "Just checking out Papaya."

I love that the name Papaya has stuck. That must be a sign he feels the same. I gesture to the thirteen-week picture, when I first heard the heartbeat. "I think Papaya was a fig in that one. Funny thing - when I was so sick, Papaya was only a kidney bean."

"Kidney beans are known to be troublemakers." He steps closer, drops a strangely chaste kiss to my forehead, and sets his hands on my belly. "And I think Papaya is almost a mango now, right?"

I nod. "How did you know?"

"I might have googled pregnancy-to-fruit comparisons. Papaya will be an eggplant in a little while."

I blink. Holy shit. He really knows his pregnancy fruits. Better than I do. ~ Lauren Blakely

We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about 'the texting generation' as if thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who couldn't boil an egg are capable of creating a culture. They grow on what we feed them. It has never been otherwise. The only thing that changes is the food. ~ Garret Keizer

But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood. ~ Ruben Blades

She looked at her Name Paper again. A slave for thirteen years. A freeman for thirteen minutes. ~ Christina Daley

If you aren't happy maybe you don't know how to be happy. -- Thirteen Reasons Why ~ Jay Asher

There are sixteen cans of coffee here; together they hold a total of thirteen and a half pounds of coffee. Doesn't that seem like cheating? ~ Andy Rooney

Chinese people are very superstitious and do not have floors for any "unlucky" numbers - that is, no numbers that include the number four (e.g., fourteen, twenty four, etc.) since "four" sounds like the word "death" in Chinese. No number thirteen either, as the country has adopted Western superstitions about unlucky thirteen. So, a building that shows fifteen floors on the floor plans physically only has twelve floors. ~ Wen-Szu Lin

I first picked up a guitar when I was ten years old; my parents surprised me with it for my tenth birthday. I started taking lessons when I was thirteen, but only for a few months, and then I just kept teaching myself. ~ Alessia Cara

How many years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blond thirteen-year old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory. ~ Giorgio Bassani

Thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions. ~ Sam Kean

A mother is a mother from the moment her baby is first placed in her arms until eternity. It didn't matter if her child were three, thirteen, or thirty. ~ Sarah Strohmeyer

Benjamin Franklin had a thirteen-week plan for moral perfection in which he practiced one virtue every week so as to turn it into a habit. ~ 4 Hour Must Reads

We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent and in doing good to all men; indeed we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul - We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.