A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.

Light flared through every limb, a force far too great to be contained in any human frame; but for that moment she was the Great Mother, giving birth to the world.

There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever.

[T]he House of Maidens was for little girls whose whole duty in life was to spill things, break things, and forget things . . . until they had spilled, broken, and forgotten everything they could, and thus made room in their lives for a little wisdom.

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

I never thought that I was very intelligent

The Goddess does not shower her gifts on those who reject them.