“There’s my baby!” I cried, quite carried away. “There’s my Poochiekins!” Ammit ran at me and leaped into my arms, nuzzling me with his rough snout. “My lord Osiris!” Disturber lost the bottom of his scroll again, which unraveled around his legs. “This is an outrage!” “Sadie,” Dad said firmly, “please do not refer to the Devourer of Souls as Poochiekins.”
“Not really. My understanding of magic is fairly straightforward. Hit enemies with a sword until they’re dead. If they rise again, hit them again. Repeat as necessary. It worked against Set.”
“Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make that happen yourself.”
“A king leads his people like a shepherd leads his flock.”
“Sadie,” Dad said firmly, “please do not refer to the Devourer of Souls as Poochiekins.”
“I was afraid to try it, but I thought: Horus? Well, it’s about time, the other voice said. Hello, Carter. ‘Oh, no,’ I said, panic rising in my chest. ‘No, no, no. Somebody get a can opener. I’ve got a god stuck in my head.”
“Little sisters,” Carter said. “If they talked too much, the Egyptians threw them to the crocodiles.”
“We wandered the halls of an infinite magic nursing home, led by a hippo nurse with a torch. Really, just an ordinary night for the Kanes.”
“Chaos is impatient. It’s random. And above all it’s selfish. It tears down everything just for the sake of change, feeding on itself in constant hunger. But Chaos can also be appealing. It tempts you to believe that nothing matters except what you want.”
“[Yeah, thanks a lot, Sadie. You get to tell the part about the Land of the Dead. I get to describe Interstate 10 through Texas.]”
“Zia looked appalled. “Setne? As in the Setne? Does Carter realize—?” “Yep.” “And Thoth suggested this?” “Yep.” “And you’re actually going along with it?” “Yep.”
“We’re not going to die,” I promised my mates. “Emma, hold my staff.” “Your—Oh, right.” She took the staff gingerly as if I’d handed her a rocket launcher, which I suppose it could’ve been with the proper spell. “Liz,” I ordered, “watch the baboon.” “Watching the baboon,” she said. “Rather hard to miss the baboon.”
“Shut up,” Thoth and I said at the same time. He looked at me with surprise. “So, Sadie…you are trying to stay in control. It won’t last. You may be blood of the pharaohs, but Isis is a deceptive, power-hungry—” “I can contain her,” I said,”
“And you, Sarah Jacobi”—he pointed to a woman with white robes and spiky black hair—“you were sent to Antarctica for causing the tsunami in the Indian Ocean.”
“Pyramids Road?’ Sadie said. ‘Obvious, much?’ ‘Maybe he couldn’t find a place on Stupid Evil Magician Street,’ I suggested.”
“Right…so when Apophis breaks out, he’ll try to destroy Ma’at, the order of the universe. He’ll swallow the sun, plunge the earth into eternal darkness, and otherwise make us have a very bad day.”
“Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same,” Dad said. “Fairness means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make”
“One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children’s.”
“Knowledge of any value can’t be given. It must be sought and earned.”
“Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.”
“She’s an old man,” he muttered. “The girl I like is a buff old man with a voice deeper than mine.”
“I didn’t like being a leader. I always had to appear confident for the sake of the others, even when I wasn’t.”
“She was beautiful when she threatened to kill me.”
“(The first scrying bowl Walt had made actually did ignite, but that’s another story.)”
“When the griffin moved, they fluttered so fast, they blurred and buzzed like the wings of the world’s largest, most vicious hummingbird.”
“Oh, no,” I said, panic rising in my chest. “No, no, no. Somebody get a can opener. I’ve got a god stuck in my head.”
“Impossible, Horus said. No one bests Horus.”
“She’s almost as annoying as you, I told Horus. Impossible, Horus said. No one bests Horus.”
“The Goddess-centered art we have been examining, with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good. If there was here no glorification of wrathful male deities or rulers carrying thunderbolts or arms, or of great conquerors dragging abject slaves about in chains, it is not unreasonable to infer it was because there were no counterparts for those images in real life.10 And if the central religious image was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life—rather than death and the fear of death—were dominant in society as well as art.”
“Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.”
“The time for falling in love was when you were emotionally available and free of cares, when it didn’t matter what time you came home or how late you were getting up the next day. When you had hours and hours to spend gazing into each other’s eyes and even longer hours making love, uninterrupted. If you wait for the perfect time to fall in love…it’ll never happen.”
“One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-natured, a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crêpe and instructing its friends to gather round and say what a pity it all is.”
“I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.”
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