There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

She thinks petting me is an honor. This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention.

The point is, Mrs. MacDonagh, that the universe is exactly the size that your soul can encompass. Some people live in extremely small worlds, and some live in a world of infinite possibility.

Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon." "They Can't? Oh! you mean they're vegetarian." "No, they eat meat. It just doesn't sway their decision making process." "Well that... that's just wrong, Atticus!Are they Monsters? It's like they have no moral center!

Winning ugly is still winning.

People used to say obvious things ironically or as a form of understatement, but in the last few decades they seem to say it with a sense of discovery, and it worries me.

I suspect that many of us, if given the chance to make one person in our lives love us more, would have no trouble in choosing where to point a finger. We are all needy, all vulnerable, all terrified that perhaps that person has an excellent reason to withhold affection. We shape our purposes to make ourselves worthy and often do not see until much later how it was love-or perhaps the lack of it-that both picked us up and dropped us off at crossroads.