Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson, #1)

by Rick Riordan

He looked at me mournfully, like he was already picking the kind of flowers I’d like best on my coffin.

Finally, she married Gabe Ugliano, who was nice the first thirty seconds we knew him,

I shook his furry hip, thinking, No! Even if you are half barnyard animal, you’re my best friend and I don’t want you to die!

Mr D looked at the wine and feigned surprise. ‘Dear me.’ He looked at the sky and yelled, ‘Old habits! Sorry!’ More thunder.

‘You’re a god.’ ‘Yes, child.’ ‘A god. You.’

I was thinking – as much as I could think with Clarisse ripping my hair out – that if this place belonged to the gods, they should’ve been able to afford classier toilets.

I drank a toast to my mother. She’s not gone, I told myself. Not permanently, anyway. She’s in the Underworld. And if that’s a real place, then some day …

‘Poseidon,’ said Chiron. ‘Earthshaker, Stormbringer, Father of Horses. Hail, Perseus Jackson, Son of the Sea God.’

Thunder shook the windows of the house. ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Dionysus said.

‘I thought that would be obvious enough. The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.’

In a way, it’s nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong.

‘Why can’t you place a blessing like that on us?’ I asked. ‘It only works on wild animals.’ ‘So it would only affect Percy,’ Annabeth reasoned.

I’d always imagined Cerberus as a big black mastiff. But he was obviously a purebred Rottweiler, except of course that he was twice the size of a woolly mammoth, mostly invisible, and had three heads.

The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.

There was a different light in his eyes, a fiery kind of pride. ‘You did well, Perseus. Do not misunderstand me. Whatever else you do, know that you are mine. You are a true son of the Sea God.’