"He fell in with the quiet revolutionaries on campus-those who felt that the disenfranchisement of half the population was ridiculous, those who did not accept that rights were predicated on skin tone-partly because he couldn't bring himself to avoid tempting trouble. He agreed with all their points, but understood that they were freer to make them purely because they had the money to build a wall around their experiences. That was what people did, wasn't it? Ignore the majority of experience and actively disengage from those telling them otherwise."

"They wouldn't have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way."

"She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night."

"Her rebirth stood in her mind with the clarity of a perfect diamond, the light scattering the rainbows through her body."

"I don't know what my future will bring me and it's terrifying. To stand before this vast expanse and know that the future could take away what matters most simply because that is the nature of indifferent chaos in the hands of wanton boys."

"As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction."

"Were genuine aliens to find us, the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens."

"You and me? We are never going to be just friends. The only time I'm not adoring you is when I am too busy hating you and wishing to God I never met you..."

"Magick need not be a crutch, but it is hard to argue that anything you lean on in lieu of building your own strength weakens resolve."

"Natural law has decreed it so. Isn't death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn."

"Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they've been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five."

"All this electromagnetic pollution in the air from the Internet and cell phones, it cuts you off from God."

"He regarded Huginn as only slightly more dangerous than most pets, in that he understood why people had pets but harbored the paranoia they would one day eat their owners. True, it kept Eliot from even having a pet larger than his fist, but it also kept him from being kibble."

"Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury."

"You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls."

"Anger is a powerful, transformative emotion, one that can light the fire under us that propels us ever higher. However, the woman wasting time at the grocery story, the man cutting us off, the website that will not load are not the right targets for our energy."

"She had picked up life where she had left off... and hoped that would be enough to get the universe to politely overlook her."

"I do not imagine I will ever cling to her like she is the last handhold on an otherwise sheer cliff. I have wings. I am ever here in this moment because she is where I want to be. She is not some inanimate savior, she has wings of her own to flutter and soar. I intend to fly beside her, to tumble through the air in loops and gambols, to carry her when she grows tired, to keep her warm beneath them against raging winds."

"The stars were so simple when she was a kid, a smattering of glowing dust circling the Earth. She did not then know that each was a sun, most considerably more massive than the daylight one she knew."

"Magic has its own weight, and that weight, the gravity of it, is pulling the fabric of reality like a bowling ball on a spandex sheet."

"Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough."

"Whenever my colleagues and I encounter a boy who acts "normal"-not explosively violent, not oppositional to every word, not obsessed with killing and dying, not focused on sexual objectification-we are overjoyed with his potential. Here is one who has a stronger foundation on which to build, one who will not knock down his every success like a child with a brick castle to see if the adults will keep helping him rebuild."

"The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself."

"The vampire community has enough problems. We don't need to add petty backbiting to it."

"The stars glittered through the atmosphere, and he thought of the distances that light must take to hit his eye at exactly that moment. Without him here, those photons would have been wasted."

"Her beauty was enough to get her into most any situation she desired and her tongue-sharp and venomous-was enough to get her out again."

"My main nurturing instinct toward children is mild sadism--picking them up and threatening to drop them--which is why I am a good uncle but would make a poor father."

"I don't think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I'd want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway."

"You get a few of them together and don't be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in."

"There weren't always happy endings and children would do well to know that vile things could happen to them, that witches and wolves were desperate to steal them should they be disobedient or foolish or simply unlucky."

"You kill by consent, every time you let something, pervert the balance when you have the power to stop it."

"Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever."

"Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious."

"If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words."

"The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word."

"I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living."

"Jasmine had endured enough parochial schooling before middle school to have a residual attachment to the beautiful parts of believing, the certainty of knowing one is loved by something beyond comprehension, but also a niggling fear of those who believed too much in anything they could not touch. Believers were the sort to wave pictures of dead fetuses at her when she went to her gynecologist for a checkup."

"The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks."

"If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her."

"A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me."

"I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant."

"[H]e had heard of, but given little credence to, magic. There was always someone talking of folk remedies and charms, but it seemed to him the inclination of fools misunderstanding chance."

"Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide."

"She felt that "truthful and "honest were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn't eaten Roselyn's Chinese leftovers, but that wasn't honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object."

"Frequently, people confront us who seemed to be egging the world into calling them on their miserable actions so they can have the pleasure of angry vengeance or an excuse to attract attention. Our compassion cannot be giving them what they think they want, since it is unreasonable to want to be hateful."

"I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization."

"I feel as though I have leapt off this massive cliff and I am still building my wings. Everyone just assumes I know how to fly, but I am pretty sure I am only falling gracefully and hoping to miss the ground."

"Christmas was gluing cotton balls to Santa's beard in Coke ads, sneaking candy canes off the tree daily (that my parents replaced every few nights), enough gift-wrap to wallpaper a room, the terror and delight of knowing a magical being would enter my home while I slept."

"Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism."

"You have to surrender yourself to the experience."