Shattered (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #7)

by Kevin Hearne

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

The garden of sarcasm is watered with impatience,

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 think life is like a ham bone if you live it right. You enjoy it and then you bury it when you’re finished. If you don’t enjoy it and you let it go to waste, you still have to bury it, so you might as well savor everything you can.>

You get a hound and people always want to pet them. I’m going to get a monkey and let it throw shite at people. They’ll clear the feck out of me way right quick.”

Dr. Jodursson’s hair tells me he isn’t looking for a lasting relationship. It’s flashy and indicates that he might belong to a tribe of modern men that Siodhachan told me about called the Douchebags.

This should be the nature of power. It must always be acquired at great personal cost.

“Snow is the form to which all water aspires, for only as snow is it unique and at rest,”

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.

Love can and does push the levers of power, yet there is no power that can force one to love another. It is a thing freely given and just as freely accepted or rejected. It is by degrees of love that we wither or blossom—and I suspect that this holds true in both the giving and receiving.

this is like the Cold War but with French toast. Though I guess “Mr. Gorbachev, pass me the syrup” doesn’t have the same drama to it.

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.

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.