"They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans."

"Hades does not have a runny nose. I know this. The entire Greek pantheon no doubt knows this. For some reason, my nose is unaware of this basic fact of mythology."

"She had experimented with Wicca eight years ago, found that her spells did not produce the desired results of making her every bully bald and fat, and threw it in the corner of her soul as effete and impractical, as she had with a series of other theological outfits."

"The demons are not easily dispatched, instead attaching themselves to otherwise beautiful things, a favorite food or a love note left for you, to see how you react when they rear up."

"It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste."

"Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her back into the cold water of life."

"Our brains want God even as our minds debunk the divine."

"We want our delusions and will violently defend these when confronted. We want to believe that the job that is slowly choking us is good, because the effort it would take to change is too terrifying to contemplate. We never want to hear how badly we are being treated in a relationship because we are strong and how dare you suggest we don't know better."

"Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles."

"Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times?"

"Even if one is doing nothing more than eating Chinese food with one's Muslim and Jewish friends (don't order the pork lo mein), being together on the longest nights of the year, as the cold sets into the ground and makes it crunch, the warmth inside is infectious and transcendent."

"He had carte blanche to eat whatever he wanted. No amount of broccoli and vitamin D kills ten lung tumors and I know not how many brain tumors. Have the tiramisu."

"If I am a pawn in someone else's chess game, you better believe I am going to demand an explanation before being shoved at some rook. I'll play my part, damn it, but I want the courtesy of being asked for my consent!"

"The art of chess is in knowing which is the most valuable piece in play, then having the courage to sacrifice it for the win."

"But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter."

"Keep to the 'I-statements' and discuss your feelings, she lectured herself. I think, I feel. Don't be accusatory. Don't tell him that he is an insecure prick who should back off before you deck him. Instead, say, 'I feel you are acting like an insecure prick who should back off before I deck you."

"[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess."

"Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided."

"Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one's life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. "It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you.Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. "I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration."

"Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire?"

"College is a blossoming new world of genital opportunity."

"To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him."

"He wouldn't be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries."

"She is an angel, how bad could it be?"Ask the first born of Israel when the Pharaoh pissed off Moses. Ask the salty residents of Sodom. Ask anyone who was not Noah or a fish once the Flood rolled in."

"The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last."

"No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book."

"I honor the divine on a daily basis, but I want to know that the greatest magick in my life is living authentically with what I have and can do."

"Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand."

"Loving her has become a part of my religion, a gentle mantra with every beating of my heart. I cannot imagine its Ragnarok without wilting."

"They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities."

"Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn't want to change me. Love appears to have made you less functional."

"When colleges, both within the Hudson Valley and throughout the country, encouraged women to do little beyond attaining their Mrs. degree in Husbandry, Annandale offered rigorous and prestigious degrees irrespective of gender."

"Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things-elves and fairies-and now we don't. Now we see them, right?"

"I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it."

"Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other... The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists... So, I chose to believe in magic."

"Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly-this wasn't technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life."

"She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries."

"Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question."

"We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming."

"Mythology was littered with people who meddled in the affairs of elves and fairies and were never again heard from."

"Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you."

"I was pure, before you defiled me, and don't you forget it. As though the concept of purity is anything more than the construct of selfish, competitive men stampeding toward the women to call dibs. I'll be damned if I'm not worth stampeding toward, but the prize had better be me, hymen or no hymen."

"If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far."

"Summer flings always seemed amazing in movies, though that might be because the leading man did not ever call his romantic interest "dude."

"My life of sin among people I'm sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool."

"We are given these niches, small worlds of our own populated by only a handful, where we feel understood. Our bubble worlds bump into innumerable others daily, but there is so little cause to allow their integrity to be breached."

"There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one whom you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that last one first, you have it made."

"Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology."

"I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered."

"Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex."