Shattered

The garden of sarcasm is watered with impatience, and mine chose that moment to bloom.

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.

To be rooted is to say, here am I nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing.

Three gods, two Druids, and a selkie walk into a bar …

It's not polite to ask if a man has a big salami in his pants, okay?

Failure is rarely a conscious decision and it’s often out of our control, determined by things like physics and circumstance and other people. What we can always control, however, is our reaction to failure.

We should be going in there with a thousand naked warriors who fight like wet cats with dodgy bowls.

I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing. And when you are rooted, defending that space ceases to be an obligation or a duty and becomes more of a desire.

I am the bringer of beef and the singer of sweet suppertime! Mine is the chicken and the gravy forever, nom nom!

Yes. It’s our duty to remember the dead. And our duty to let them go.

this guy is pretty slick, Atticus. What else do you think he has in his pockets? Maybe a thick salami for me?> I almost dropped the goblets. Gods, Oberon, it’s a good thing no one can hear you. It’s not polite to ask if a man has a big salami in his pants, okay? Especially this guy. Laughter bubbled forth from Jesus as he poured two generous shots for us. “I like your hound, Siodhachan.” He turned his head a bit to address him. “Hello, Oberon. I can hear what you say as well, and I tell you truly, I have nothing against salami itself. It is best to know when to keep your salami in your pants and when to pull it out, however, and even my priests have had some difficulty with that issue. Fortunately for us, there is little doubt regarding the right course of action in this situation.” He pulled a long soppressata from the same pocket that had produced the goblets.

rooted is to say, here am I nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing.

When a fight comes at ye, it’s not going to ask if you’re in shape for it! Ye have to be ready whenever it comes, and the day I’m not ready for a fight is the day I’m dead!

What are you so pleased about?" "I only drink a little at a time, like half a cup ever four or five months, to maintain my current age. Half a cup has a mild laxative effect." "What kind of effect?" "Laxative. It means it loosens the bowels." "Half a cup has... But you just had me drink a whole pot!" "That's why I brought you the shovel...

That was it. Owen grabbed his arm, yanked it toward him, and head-butted the punk. He went down with a yelp and Owen stood up, kicking his chair away behind him. "Respect your elders, lad!" The inn got quiet the way things will when shit gets real.

Of course, I didn’t choose to fail. Failure is rarely a conscious decision and it’s often out of our control, determined by things like physics and circumstance and other people. What we can always control, however, is our reaction to failure.

I don’t have enough information to make a rational decision. It’s like you’re asking me to order a drink according to how me nipples are feeling instead of telling me what they’re ready to pour.

So my free advice is to always find something to love and to make you laugh—something that will keep you in the here and now. Hounds are good at it, and they work for me. They may or may not work for you.

The future is a many-forked path,” she said, “and only you can choose which one to follow.” “I know that. What I don’t know is what waits at the end of those paths.” “Victory or death. Choose well.

They say, ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow.

I hurt in places I didn’t know were places.

I hope that if I ever travel two thousand years into the future, there will still be bacon.

I bet it’s a universal truth: You eat your pie or go home.

Atticus makes gigantic mistakes at times. But there are also times like this one when he makes of his life a poem and achieves an apotheosis of sorts, when his years manifest as wisdom and he spies a path forward that no one else sees until he points it out. And in this case that means not allowing swords to fall where they may.

Don’t hate the Meat Lord, Atticus. Just offer him steak sauce and words of praise.

We are far past the time when everything might have turned out well. We are now in crisis management, hoping that things will turn out badly instead of much, much worse.

An ignoranus,” Manannan explains, “is someone who’s both stupid and an arsehole.

I have noticed over many centuries of relationships that a corollary to love is worry. They sort of come together as a matched set, and it’s nigh impossible to ditch one without the other. I don’t mean worry in the sense of a constant hand-wringing or an outward show of anxiety but a silent panic, always there but flaring up on occasion until one chokes and cannot see through a sudden veil of tears, panic that what you cherish most will be scarred or lost or taken away forever.

Now, ye know right well I’m in favor of solving problems through stomping on nuts, but the first rule to follow—the one ye didn’t remember—is not to stomp on your own.

Few things trigger old memories so quickly as authority figures from our youth. I’m not saying those memories are necessarily good ones; they’re simply old and tend to cast us back into roles we thought we grew out of long ago. Sometimes the memories are warm and blanket us like a mother’s love. More often, however, they have the sting of hoarfrost, which bites at first, then numbs and settles in the bones for a deep, extended chill.