"Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins."

"The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives."

"The Word no longer belonged to Man because they believed it did not. Man saw the gods alone as Creators and forgot that there had ever been any other way."

"I don't much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance."

"People who believe their god loves them unconditionally are less able to be controlled through divine terrorism."

"She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating."

"We're all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don't die."

"Do you know what Hell is? ...No fire, no brimstone. Man in his infinite folly invented that to rob from his brothers their will. Hell is existing without Our Father. None of His love touches me."

"Reciting from rote seems a terrible way to honor the gods and a precise killing of the power of the words."

"She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness."

"Ghosts are some of the loneliest people you will ever meet."

"Private moments held not a candle to coitus, not even the expensive kind of candle that made the whole room smell of far off seasons."

"I think it simply comes down to fantasy being the language I speak. While I cannot get into epic sword and sorcery, I see the world as having the potential to be slightly off-kilter. I have run into people who do not quite seem human " though of course they are " and have been privy to coincidences that almost make me believe in magic. Fantasy is sometimes just asking yourself, "Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn't work the way you think? What would that mean?"

"I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people."

"Even in concept, angels are unsettling. They're like drones, totally mindlessly following the will of God. The only difference between the Heavenly angels and demons is that the demons opted to follow after a different queen bee. So, you have these eyeball speckled, part animal monsters who exist only to worship and obey God. They don't have a moral compass, they just act."

"Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking."

"Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing."

"The trouble with psychics is that they convince you that you get this future no matter what you do. It is as though you can cheat the universe out of your experiences, that you need only tweak something here or there to live happily ever after. It allows for spiritual sloth in the certainty of providence."

"I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don't need to be a biblical literalist to love my God."

"Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time."

"The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger."

"No one should ever die alone. Rejoin the love of the goddess who made you. No longer a man, no longer a human, you must go as only your essence back to She who made you, into the womb of the Great Mother. You have again become a seed that will form into other lives in other lands."

"The most compassionate thing I can do for them is continuing to see their potential. They need to know that people are not going to abandon them because of their bad behavior. Only in the security of this can they let themselves learn better strategies."

"None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us."

"Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked."

"Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation."

"Some points in time cannot flow. Think of those big-ticket moments, the ones you could still recite from fifth grade: your 1492 and Civil Wars, the Titanic and presidential assassinations. These are icebergs, solid and immense, forcing incalculable eddies to swirl around them."

"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."

"That these people are wandering around, looking for aliens to justify the emptiness inside them and let them feel special without effort, creeps me out."

"Time owed an alliance to the undying."

"A goddess does not need to eat and does so only for her pleasure."

"[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability."

"Santa is like a queen bee. All the elves are his drones, who exist to feed him royal jelly, which I guess would be milk and cookies. If an elf escapes and eats royal cookies, it will turn into another Santa. That's what all those mall Santas are. They're trying to start their own festive colonies."

"Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds."

"The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass."

"It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength."

"Now, it's been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That's the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not."

"Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town."

"They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead."

"When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods."

"The UFOs were explicable enough, just experimental aircrafts from the airport. Of course the government was not going to tell people what was actually going on. She would not be surprised if the government encouraged the UFO cultists to flock there as the perfect cover, since no one would ever believe them."

"They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won't manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals."

"Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker."

"She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it."

"Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness."

"Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic."

"She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls."

"If you can't feel the touch of the gods on your own, it greatly behooves you to work on that before some lecher tells you his touch is just as good."

"We're not mad," he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority."

"You belong to the world. Don't be afraid to be a part of it."