Today's Stichomancy for George S. Patton

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber:

espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name or anything about her, except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't.

So then: "Hoo-hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and I'll be down."

Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which would make them border on the red.

"You big ape, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice.

One Basket

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale:

Oh, the empty dreams were dim And the empty dreams were wide, They were sweet and shadowy houses Where my thoughts could hide.

But you took my dreams away And you made them all come true -- My thoughts have no place now to play, And nothing now to do.

Lights

When we come home at night and close the door, Standing together in the shadowy room,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James:

have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place was there more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche:

coyness in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset.

115. Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, woman's play is mediocre.

116. The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

117. The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.

118. There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day.

Beyond Good and Evil