Ff Family Quotes

All different yet somehow alike-not family but easy with one another and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl’s heart soared: a story came alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!

monarchy, if it was like the monarchies which governed Israel’s neighbors, was alien to the ideals which they had learned in the wilderness. Let Yahweh alone be acknowledged as King in Israel. Let him use as his agents not one particular family, but the men whom from time to time he might choose, giving them special powers, to rule his people and defend

One of Gideon's sons, Abimelech by name, did not share his father's views about kingship. (He, however, was the son of a Canaanite woman and had been brought up with his mother’s relatives at Shechem.) After his father’s death he attempted to succeed to his power, and killed off most of the other members of Gideon’s family in the process. For three years he reigned as king from Shechem, but his kingdom did not extend beyond Western Manasseh.

In the classical era, the Lar was duplicated and the Lares became rather confused, or at least associated, with the Penates, who appear in the lararia of Pompeii in the form of gods for whom the master of the house had a fondness. As for the two Lares, they are shown as two young people, their heads crowned with flowers, pouring the contents of a rhyton into a situla or libation patera. They flank Vesta or the domestic 'Genius' or spirit, thus setting an example of sacrificial piety. They are also to be found in the company of Mercury, Venus, Bacchus or other deities dear to the paterfamilias. The one or two snakes associated with the Genius, or shown below the Lares (sometimes entwined around the altar where the Genius sacrifices) appear to be the guardians of the place as well as an expression of the vital, if not genetic, force of the family. When Aeneas pays homage to the Manes of his father (Virg., Aen., 5, 84 ff.), a serpent appears and, slithering among the paterae and vessels, 'tastes the sacred food

In 312 BC, the censor Appius Claudius made another private cult public: that of Hercules at the Great Altar (Ara Maxima), where Virgil (Aen., 8, 102 ff.) portrays Evander presiding over the annual festival. It was the responsibility of the Poticii and Pinarii families, following tradition.

Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, 'Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.' Take some family history and politics, add cutting-edge military technology, mix in state-of-the-art genetics, top it off with next generation neurophysiology, and you have the ingredients for an elaborate deception. The untangling of the web of deception in Double Crossed presented an opportunity to incorporate elements of history, medicine, technology, and politics, all of which are longstanding interests of mine. The challenge was doing it gradually enough to sustain the reader's interest without giving away so much that it spoiled a surprise. We live in an age when no undertaking seems off limits, whether it be as simple as traditional spy craft, as overt as military intervention, or as sophisticated as cyber-espionage and ransomware. Although we do not currently possess the technology needed to pull off something as audacious and complex as what occurs in Double Crossed, that day is rapidly approaching.