Hounded, by Kevin Hearne

Little bits of wisdom from Hounded by Kevin Hearne...

It had been a long time since I'd felt any desire to truly inflict pain upon another person. I tend to take the long view in dealing with irritating people - as in, I'm going to outlive whoever irritates me, so the problem will eventually go away. I had privately changed "This, too, shall pass" into "You, too, shall die," and it helped me avoid all sorts of conflicts.
P 162

The point is that the universe is exactly the size that your soul can encompass. Some people live  in extremely small worlds, and some live  in a world of infinite possibility.
P 169

It reminded me that Oberon had magic of his own: he could focus my attention on how perfectly sublime life can be at times. Such moments are ephemeral, and without his guidance I might have missed many of them, working so hard to get somewhere that I would fail to recognize when I had arrived.
P 204

Wisdom of a druid

Other people in my life right now, who help me forget all the other people I have buried or lost: they are truly magic for me.

Atticus, pag. 141 of Hounded by Kevin Hearne

Nice bits about living in urban America: low god density

Sometimes I forget what I look like and I do something out of character, such as sing shepherd tunes in Aramaic while I'm waiting in linea at Starbucks, but the nice bit about living in urban America is that people tend to either ignore eccentrics or move to the suburbs to escape them.
That never would have happened in the old days. People who were different back then got burned at the stake or stoned to death. There is still a downside to being different today, of course, which is why I put so much effort into blending in, but the downside is usually just harassment and discrimination, and that is a vast improvement over dying for the common man's entertainment.
Living in the modern world contains quite a few vast improvements like that. Most old souls I know think the attraction of modernity rests on clever ideas like indoor plumbing and sunglasses. But for me, the true attraction of America is that it's pratically godless. When I was younger and dodging the Romans, I could hardly walk a mile in Europe without stepping on a stone sacred to some god or other. But out here in Arizona, all I have  to worry about is the occasional encounter with Coyote, and I actually rather like him. (He's nothing like Thor, for one thing, and that right there means were're going to get along fine. The local  college kids would describe Thor as a "major asshat" if they ever had the misfortune to meet him).
Even better than the low god density in Arizona is the near total absence of faeries.

Kevin Hearne, Hounded

Alla faccia tua, Thor!

Hounded, by Kevin Hearne

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them  is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like  this: Someone  shrugs off the weight  of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

Kevin Hearne, Hounded

Uno dei migliori incipit letti negli ultimi anni!