Staked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #8)

by Kevin Hearne

It was that episode and the next one, with that man who claimed to be Jesus—” “Uh, that really was Jesus.” “As you say.” “Well, I’m pretty sure he would say it too. And to be clear, Rabbi, his existence doesn’t negate or invalidate—much less eradicate—the existence of your god. Or any of my gods, or anyone else’s. He just is. As is Yahweh and Brighid and Odin and the rest.”

He nodded, and his beard, thankfully, did not move of its own volition. “I can accept that now. I couldn’t back then. It requires a flexibility of thought, yes? A certain openness to the idea that people must walk their own road to salvation and not necessarily follow me on mine. I had taken my faith too far.”

If I’m going to take the trouble to memorize something, I want it to be transcendent and worthy of echoes in my head.

I’m acutely aware that I should free my mind of his poison and just outlive him. But sometimes we do things that make no sense except in some arcane calculus hidden in our emotions. And we can seek therapy or religion to provide us relief like balm on chafed skin, but that’s denying our own power to heal ourselves, and trying to silence old pain with new opiates.

I simply can’t live here in this fecking wasteland of concrete and cactus. I need me trees.”

It’s best, methinks, to have Druids from all over Gaia; that way they’ll each have a special stretch of the earth calling to their hearts.

It’s tough to not get emotional when ye finally realize that you’re not trapped on the planet with things that want to eat ye or tell ye what to do. All the earth wants ye to do is thrive, and ye feel that love whenever ye contact an elemental.

English has way too many fecking homophones,

I know that when ye think o’ love you’re supposed to think o’ kissy faces and scented soap and hummin’ happy songs together, but there’s another vital part to it that people rarely admit to themselves: We want somebody to rescue us from other people. From talking to them, I mean, or from the burden of giving a damn about what they say. We don’t want to be polite and stifle our farts, now, do we? We want to let ’em rip and we want to be with someone who won’t care if we do, who will love us regardless and fart right back besides.