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All the while Lina is thinking, This is it. You will grow a pair, Lina, and do what you need to do for yourself. Quit being lonely and unhappy. Her head isn't foggy, she is thinking clearly for the first time in such a long time. You're thirty-two years old. Your life is going by quickly. If you wait until you're fifty-two when the children are all grown up, the chances that you will meet someone will be lower.

Lina was raised not to talk about emotions. Her parents were fluent int he language of Oh God Lina You're Fine. Enough, Lina. get Over It, Lina. You Have It Good Enough, Lina. When she became a mother, she got a little respect. She was staying at home with the kids, ten hours a day, five days a week. She told her mother she could use some help; maybe her mother could watch the kids so Lina could go and exercise.

There are two kinds of fifteen-year-old girls, Lina knows, and she belongs to the kind that does more sticker-collecting than French-kissing. In her bedroom she closes her eyes and imagines falling in love. Lina wants that more than anything else. She believes that girls who say they want to be successful in their careers more than they want to fall in love are lying.

Renouncing the pleasures of gourmet cooking is for some the greatest of sacrifices. For five years before her notable début at the Met in 1949, the soprano Astrid Várnay spent all her spare time either cooking or studying educational books. Operative success led to so many singing engagements that she had to give up the latter, but an irresistible interest in new recipes kept her in the kitchen whenever at home.

'A grander head was never more grandly set on human shoulders...His shoe was as big as a child's boat. One could have clad the child in one of his gloves.' Musical gourmets might indeed be proud to have this Brobdingnagian in their ranks. Also in that apartment house lived Manuel Garcia the elder, a superb Spanish tenor who was a brilliant maestro di canto, and whose daughters were to rise to fame.

And she went away, with a wave of her fingertips, bye-bye. Taking the sob away with her. That's how Mom is, she can take away my sobs. I hope she doesn't keep them for herself. Later on I'm going to invent special garbage cans for sobs. The sobs would be dumped out into the sewers, where the rats would eat them. They say rats will eat anything. And we'd all feel better. I went back to sleep.

It had grown dark outside the Institute, and Sophie's lantern cast strange dancing shadows on the walls as she led Tessa down one flight of stone stairs after another. The steps were old, concave in the centers, where generations of feet had worn them down. The walls were roughly textured stone, the tiny windows set into them at intervals, giving way eventually to blankness.

"You know this thing with Henna only really came up when she started dating Tony. And now she's going to Africa after graduation. and then Nathan comes into our lives to catch her eye when she's single and you're still 'gathering your courage.'" He eats a french fry off the plate. "Ever thought you only really like her because there's always something in the way of actually getting close to her?"

The floor is cold, and chills radiate from my back to my arms and legs. I'm dotted with goose bumps, my face wet with tears. The ceiling is covered in glowing patterns that shift when the wind rustles the trees. Dancing shapes, dark shadows, begging me to translate them into fabric. Inspired, I let myself get mad--no, angry. Livid. "how dare you," I yell at all the anons in my head. Leave us alone.

Helm's exploits might've left the world astounded, but they left him satiated. If he wanted a female, he didn't have to speak. Eye contact, a smile--one simple touch--and they'd follow him anywhere and agree to anything. He liked to give pleasure before he inflicted pain, which meant that nine times out of ten, smiles came before the screams. "There. Delicious," he murmured. "I want to sing her to sleep."

His chambers aren't as airy as mine. The windows are too small and too high. Perhaps if he hung from a perch in the ceiling, the air would move and we would breathe. We don't; we can't. We're second to the king, after all. Poor Sapiens. I'm still his favorite, but now I hate him. I don't care if he dies in what comes next.

The night was clear as I made my way into the heart of the wood. It had rained earlier that day, and a few clouds lingered, but the bright, full face of the moon shone down on me, touching the forest with silver frost. But I would have been able to find my way to the Goblin Grove even if the night had been as black as pitch. The woods and the legends surrounding it were etched into my bones, a map of my soul.

The burning tip of his cigarette lit up his fingers in the darkness. He kept the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then exhaled, watching the patterns it made in the segment of light above the bed. He felt the girl's breathing falter for a moment, and he looked at her sharply. She was frowning and moaning quietly, like a child having a nightmare.

He got up from the bed slowly, so as not to wake the ghost sleeping by his side, listening for the sound of her breathing. Sometimes he almost heard it. "You're as dead as your books, Corso. You've never loved anyone." That was the first and last time she'd used his surname. The first and last time she'd refused him her body, before leaving him for good. In search of the child he'd never wanted.

La Ponte could even recite the names of all the crew of the Pequod: Ahab, Stubb, Starbuck, Flask, Perth, Parsee, Queequeg, Tasthego, Daggoo…Or the names of all the ships mentioned in Moby Dick: the Goney, the Town-Ho, the Jeroboam, the Jungfrau, the Rose-bud, the Batchelor, the Delight, the Rachel…And he even knew what ambergris was.

TONIGHT, THE PALAIS felt like a devil’s dream of heaven, full of golden wolves and gleaming teeth and stars white as milk. Inside, the Palais had been redecorated for the full moon festivities. waitresses darted between tables, trailing burning seraph wings. The obsidian floor looked like a void flecked with stars. Patrons in wolf masks sat in velvet chairs, tossing back their liquor and howling with laughter.

The slower tempo of the adagio lent itself to a more meditative, melancholy air, but I did not want complacence and resignation. No, I wanted the melody to unsettle and disturb him, even as it beguiled and tempted him. Rising notes, a pause, then resolution. Modulating higher. The same pattern, a pause, then resolution. I thought of the Goblin King's hands, sliding over my skin. A laden pause, then a painful grip.

During the Cold War 1960s, 59% of Americans held that anyone who did not believe in God should not be able to teach in public schools; 24% still believed that in the 1980s. In 2003 and 2009 news stories appeared of employers terminating atheist employees. But nowhere is the private discrimination against atheists more blatant discrimination than in the Boy Scouts of America.

Judge Ireland and Judge Bauman both cite earlier court pronouncements offering as historical truth “the fact the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself.”

They are both wrong. God is nowhere to be found in the American Constitution.

"In terms of suicide, escaping to an undamaged hunter-gatherer society isn't the worst way to do it. You can't choose heaven; heaven chooses you. But this would be sidestepping logic and theology and just going directly, should your idea of heaven be spearfishing with Wayne DeMint all day," Lena said.

FM and Am stations blinked out like dying stars. But there are holdouts. Old-school rabble-rousers. Like DJ HiJax, who snatches nighttime waves to play old songs, long forgotten, and reminisces in altered voices about the days when music belonged to the people. Tonight, though, no such luck, HiJax is on the run, setting up another pirate radio station in yet another undisclosed location.

Pythagoras was a sixth-century B.C. Greek mathematician who so believed in the powers of numbers that he thought nothing else could better unravel the mysteries of the universe. He founded a belief system, Pythagoreanism, based on the idea that numbers and mathematics are mystical, and that everything in reality is related to their harmony, pattern, or dissonance.

According to references in the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and folklore, there was an original version of Genesis that had God creating a woman named Lilith before Eve was formed. He made Lilith and Adam from the same clay, but from the start they were bickering with each other, despite the paradisiacal environs. Legend has it that Lilith didn't like Adam's earthy smell and refused to have sex.

I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this.

Sometimes irreligious attitudes can be as dangerous as religious ones. In the 1920s, the Mexican government tried to pry loose the Jesuits' more than three-century hold on the populace. They added new anticlerical amendments to the constitution in an attempt to end the Catholic Church's sway. The law forbade Jesuits to teach, banned most Catholic sects, prohibited churches from holding property.

--Whatever you do, don't turn on the outside lights. That would only draw the paparazzi. Just sit out in the night air and whisper with me. Just listen to my voice if you can't talk. You're going to get through this, Lyn. Lloyd and I are here for you, baby.
So I sit in the dark and look at the phone I'm holding.
--Who's calling? I ask.
I notice it's a mild night and I wonder if it's going to rain tomorrow.

--Oh, you'll love this. They're going to cover the prewedding activities, including but not limited to, my dressing for the BIG EVENT with my closest girlfriends present.
--There's no way you're doing this.
--They suggest I buff up a little for the lingerie shots.
--Discreet cameras tucked artfully in your wedding suite? What the hell has happened to Caesar's?

"Do you think I'm fat?" Cat asked in the lunch line on Wednesday. Eureka was bored by diet conversations. She would have loved to fill a bathing suit as well as Cat. "I" know I'm not fat," Cat said as they navigated through the dizzying maze of tables. "and you know, apparently. But does Rodney know?" "He'd better. Did he say something? and if he did, do you care?"

Cat Estes had a particular way of arching her left eyebrow and parking one hand on her hip, which Eureka knew meant Dish. Her best friend had a splash of big, dark freckles across her nose, a charming gap between her two front teeth, curves in all sorts of places Eureka didn't, and highlighted hair braided in thick pigtails.

"I had my eye on a woman once," he said, "and I asked the abbess to examine our bloodlines--privately, because I did not want to propose without knowing in advance that our marriage would be sanctioned. Upon examining mine, she informed me that there would be no sanctioned marriage for me. Ever." She looked at him in wonder and not a little sadness. She hadn't been aware that he'd had any contact with his mother.