Good Thing I Didn't Follow Through

When I was a child and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always answered that I didn't know. Nobody had much back then, including hope, and our family fit in that mold; it would have seemed presumptuous and immodest to act as if we could control our future. So I said I had no idea but I really did have a secret aspiration. I wanted to be in one of the few books our family owned, and that was Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. My father was a history buff. He was born at the end of the 19th Century, and was pretty much an expert on all of the history as was then recorded in the textbooks of the day. He used to ask us kids who said "Don't give up the ship, I only regret I have but one life to give for my country, War is hell." I figured that if I had been in any one of those situations, I might have come up with that exact quote, or maybe even a better one that would be worth inclusion in Bartlett's book. The only one I wasn't sure of was "Don't fire til you see the whites of their eyes." I didn't think I could have come up with that one.