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It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free.
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Rachel Held Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood)
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Your topsoil's a disaster area — it's starved for nitrogen, it's been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet.
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Peter S. Beagle (Tamsin)
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The size of Frank Sinatra's penis had been on my mind for weeks. I don't know why it was bothering me so much, but it was.
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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As a Jew, keeping kosher was tantamount to Peter’s very faith and identity, but when following Jesus led him to the homes and tables of Gentiles, Peter had a vision in which God told him not to let rules—even biblical ones—keep him from loving his neighbor. So when Peter was invited to the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, he declared: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28). Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new.
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Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
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But I must say, it's a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love. Especially a husband.
Tough, funny, vulgar, cynical, it was a classic Ava Gardner line.
It rolled off the tongue. I didn't want to lose it.
The problem was I couldn't reconcile it with something she had told me earlier--that she was "even more in love with all three of my husbands the day I left them than the day we married."
-author Peter Evans
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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i see poets riding the red winds unchecked by the borders of time, wandering with light feet over the land mines and trip wires, barbed and barbarian, unfettered through the barriers that curtail the flows of life, poets pelting the halting barriers which strangle everyone everywhere.
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Peter Standish Evans (Red Winds Howl)
“
A great word becomes a great sentence with great meaning from great writers who have a great imagination and who enchant greatness
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Mark Peter Evans
“
I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip.
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.
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Ben Aaronovitch (Broken Homes (Peter Grant, #4))
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leave the timing of the
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Peter Evans (NEMESIS)
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Its aircon was functional rather than luxurious,
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Peter J. Evans (Oceans of Dust (Stargate SG-1 #19))
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She was infuriating, bawdy, frank, and unreasonable. She was also kind, affectionate, trusting, and often touching.
And I adored her.
--said by the author Peter Evans
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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whichever’s the sooner. Okay?
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Peter J. Evans (Oceans of Dust (Stargate SG-1 #19))
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PLH are in big trouble.
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Peter J. Evans (Oceans of Dust (Stargate SG-1 #19))
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With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others. We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity. As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong. In short, we never learned to doubt. Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them. If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time. We can say, as Tennyson said, Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.15 I sometimes wonder if I might have spent fewer nights in angry, resentful prayer if only I’d known that my little systems — my theology, my presuppositions, my beliefs, even my fundamentals — were but broken lights of a holy, transcendent God. I wish I had known to question them, not him. What my generation is learning the hard way is that faith is not about defending conquered ground but about discovering new territory. Faith isn’t about being right, or settling down, or refusing to change. Faith is a journey, and every generation contributes its own sketches to the map. I’ve got miles and miles to go on this journey, but I think I can see Jesus up ahead.
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Rachel Held Evans (Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions)
“
When I was a little girl, if someone asked me why I was a Christian, I said it was because Jesus lived in my heart. In high school, I said it was because I accepted the atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross for my sins. My sophomore year of college, during a short-lived Reformed phase, I said it was because of the irresistible grace of God. But after watching Zarmina's execution on television, I decided that the most truthful answer to that question was this: I was a Christian because I was born in the United States of America in the year 1981 to Peter and Robin Held. Arminians call it free will; Calvinists call it predestination. I call it "the cosmic lottery.
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Rachel Held Evans (Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions)
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Why do you think that?” she asked sharply. It was the kind of question Peter Viertel had warned me about. When they were making The Sun Also Rises, in which she played Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley, he told me: “I’d show her the script, she’d ask something innocuous like, ‘Would Lady Brett say that line?’ or ‘Does Lady Brett need to say anything here? Jake [Barnes, the narrator and hero of The Sun Also Rises, played by Tyrone Power] will understand from her look what she’s thinking. There will be no need to spell it out.’ “And suddenly she’s embroiled you in an almighty argument about the script, or about the book you’re trying to write for her. You can’t reason with her because she never approaches anything intellectually. She is the most intuitive woman I know.
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
“
Many modern readers assume teachings about wives submitting to their husbands appear exclusively in the pages of Scripture and thus reflect uniquely “biblical” views about women’s roles in the home. But to the people who first heard these letters read aloud in their churches, the words of Peter and Paul would have struck them as both familiar and strange, a sort of Christian remix on familiar Greco-Roman philosophy that positioned the male head of house as the rightful ruler over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. By instructing men to love their wives and respect their slaves, and by telling everyone to “submit to one another” with Jesus as the ultimate head of house, the apostles offer correctives to cultural norms without upending them. They challenge new believers to reconsider their relationships with one another now that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Galatians 3:28). The plot thickens when we pay attention to some of the recurring characters in the Epistles and see a progression toward more freedom and autonomy for slaves like Onesimus and women like Nympha, Priscilla, Junia, and Lydia.
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Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
“
*———. The Mystery of Israel’s Origins: An Introduction and Proposals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. *Stager, Lawrence E. “Forging and Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stark, Thomas. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010. *Thomas, Heath A., Jeremy Evans, and Paul Copan, eds. Holy War in the Bible: Christian Morality and an Old Testament Problem. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013. Williamson, H. G. M. 1 and 2 Chronicles. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982. Wright, N. T. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012. *———. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. ———. Paul in Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. ———. Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why It Matters. San Francisco: HarperOne,
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Peter Enns (The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It)
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To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.
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Peter Enns (The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs)
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think that was interesting? “I almost died
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
Peter J. Evans (Oceans of Dust (Stargate SG-1 #19))
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Bob Evans's judgement of Beatty is most severe. According to him, Beatty didn't lose it; he never had it. "You know what Warren's greatest talent is?" he asked rhetorically, in 1994. "How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That's batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you're sent back to the minors for that. Not Warren.
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Peter Biskind (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America)
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Wholehearted, vulnerable faith lives not in the mental citadel but on the open, windswept plains of the heart. And on that vast terrain, we are called first not to proclamation but, once again, to observation, to listening, and to love: “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”3 Peter undoubtedly knew the words of the Shema by heart.
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Rachel Held Evans (Wholehearted Faith)
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Today is Evan Peters Birthday. I need to bake a cake.
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Meeee
“
But I must say, it’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love.
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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What is it they say? The fucking you get for the fucking you got?
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Peter Evans (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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Evan flashed on Peter sitting on the couch in his dead father’s dress shirt—I don’t have anyone to be proud of me—and the image about wrecked him. How could a kid that fundamentally good ever have to wonder if he was good enough for someone to be proud of?
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Gregg Hurwitz (Prodigal Son (Orphan X, #6))
“
Olives?” “No, thank you,” Evan said. “Not for the Polugar.” “I understand.” The single-malt rye vodka smelled like dough. A throwback to the pre-ethanol distillation process that produced the Russian breadwine enjoyed by literal and literary nobility from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Polugar meant “half-burned.” The term signified the outstanding portion of liquid remaining after the excess had been burned away. Far off the beaten path in the woods of Poland, the vodka was not aged in oak barrels but triple-distilled in copper and filtrated with egg whites and birch coal.
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Gregg Hurwitz (Dark Horse (Orphan X, #7))
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whether the Greco-Roman household codes reflected upon in Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter are in and of themselves holy, or if their appearance in Scripture represents the early church’s attempt to blend Christianity and culture in such a way that it would preserve the dignity of adherents while honoring prevailing social and legal norms of the day.
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Rachel Held Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood)
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A year of biblical womanhood would mean, among other things, rising before dawn (Proverbs 31:15), submitting to my husband (Colossians 3:18), growing out my hair (1 Corinthians 11:15), making my own clothes (Proverbs 31:21–22), learning how to cook (Proverbs 31:15), covering my head in prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5), calling Dan “master” (1 Peter 3:5–6), caring for the poor (Proverbs 31:20), nurturing a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4), and remaining ceremonially impure for the duration of my period (Leviticus 15:19–
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Rachel Held Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood)
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A young Catholic couple, on their way to get married, are involved in a fatal car accident. They find themselves outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven. With marriage being on their mind, the first question they asked St. Peter was, “Can we get married in heaven?” St. Peter said, “Let me go find out.” The couple waited. While waiting, they began to wonder what would happen if their marriage didn't work out; could you get a divorce in heaven? After three months, St. Peter finally returns, looking completely bedraggled. “Yes,” he informs the couple, “you can get married in Heaven.” “Great!” replied the couple, “But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?” St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slammed his clipboard onto the ground. “Oh, come on!”, he shouted, “It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have any idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?
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Steve Evans (World's Funniest Jokes Omnibus vol 1 & 2)
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The Bible looks the way it does,” wrote Peter Enns, “because, like Jesus, when God shows up, it’s in the thick of things.
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Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
“
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis,” wrote Peter Enns, “to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.”2
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Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
“
Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them. If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time.
”
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Rachel Held Evans (Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions)
“
I get the last laugh. Because you see, handing me the talisman and going to Heaven means you'll be personally responsible for two others being tortured. Locked in a room with a demon at the height of her power for the rest of eternity. Evan's blood would be on your hands. Sean's blood would be on your hands. How could you live with that? How could one person be so cruel as to hand the others an eternal sentence of cold-blooded torture?
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Peter Fenton (Abandon All Hope)
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EVAN. Have you no faith?
MELISSA. Of course not. I'm an atheist.
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Peter Fenton
“
... I said something about the way some of the longshoremen smelled. They smelled just godawful, especially when they'd just come back from their night shifts. Mama said: That's what money smells like, honey. You still wanna be rich?
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Ava Gardner (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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... keep telling her how beautiful she looks. Keep on saying that. How beautiful she looks. Lay it on thick. She won't believe you, she's too smart to fall for blarney, but it's what she wants to hear. It's the tribute you must always pay to great beauties when they grow old. Remember it's always the cameraman who grows old, never the star.
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Ava Gardner (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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My accent was as Tarheel as it gets. That's incomprehensible to anyone who lives more than two whoops and a holler outside of the state of North Carolina.
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Ava Gardner (Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations)
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This was not advice for a debate team; it was advice for martyrs! Peter asked his readers to take courage, to look into the eyes of their assailants with patience and compassion, gentleness and respect. He urged them to live lives that are beyond reproach, to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and love their enemies to the point of death. This passage is not about fearlessly defending a set of propositions; it’s about fearlessly defending hope — a wild, bewitching, and reckless thing that cannot be systematized or proven or rationally explained
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Rachel Held Evans (Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions)
“
BIBLIOGRAPHY Often the question of which books were used for research in the Merry series is asked. So, here is a list (in no particular order). While not comprehensive, it contains the major sources. An Encyclopedia of Faeries by Katharine Briggs Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend by Miranda J. Green Celtic Goddesses by Miranda J. Green Dictionary of Celtic Mythology by Peter Berresford Ellis Goddesses in World Mythology by Martha Ann and Dorothy Myers Imel A Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross The Ancient British Goddesses by Kathy Jones Fairy Tradition in Britain by Lewis Spense One Hundred Old Roses for the American Garden by Clair G. Martin Taylor’s Guide to Roses Pendragon by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd Kings and Queens from Collins Gem Butterflies of Europe: A Princeton Guide by Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington Butterflies and Moths of Missouri by J. Richard and Joan E. Heitzman Dorling Kindersly Handbook: Butterflies and Moths by David Carter The Natural World of Bugs and Insects by Ken and Rod Preston Mafham Big Cats: Kingdom of Might by Tom Brakefield Just Cats by Karen Anderson Wild Cats of the World by Art Wolfe and Barbara Sleeper Beauty and the Beast translated by Jack Zipes The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm translated by Jack Zipes Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old by Ralph Manheim Complete Guide to Cats by the ASPCA Field Guide to Insects and Spiders from the National Audubon Society Mammals of Europe by David W. MacDonald Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham Northern Mysteries and Magick by Freya Aswym Cabbages and Kings by Jonathan Roberts Gaelic: A Complete Guide for Beginners The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley Holland The Penguin Companion to Food by Alan Davidson
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Laurell K. Hamilton (Seduced by Moonlight (Meredith Gentry, #3))
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But more than that was the strangeness she felt here, the deep, unscratchable itch, the nagging wrongness written into her bones. It was as though there had been a compass in her, hidden and unknown yet totally fundamental to her sense of the world, and now that compass no longer had a north to point at.
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Peter J. Evans (Feeders From Within)
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He got Laura Miles to hospital,” said Sam.
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Peter J. Evans (Oceans of Dust (Stargate SG-1 #19))