Flesh And Fire Series Quotes

A growing heat, like a million blazing suns all focused on me, lit my insides. It felt like I was being cooked in the Gabriella Roast Cooker, me spinning around-and-around to heat my flesh evenly. For some reason I was having trouble comprehending the sudden change in my revolving world as I swelled with a horrible, billowing fire.

Veal! Trust these bloated plutocrats to eat the flesh of poor, newly-born calves!

A series of luminous golden swirls swept over the top of my hand and between my thumb and pointer finger, sweeping in several whirls along the lines of my palm. I looked at Ash’s hand. He bore the same mark as I did.

As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God’s love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life’s mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other’s inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God;

every choice to do or not do something creates a chain reaction. You can’t help but wonder exactly how much is preordained.” “You’ll drive yourself mad thinking about that,” Nektas replied. “But none of your choices are preordained. Fate is not absolute. Fate is only a series of possibilities.” “How can you be sure of that?” I asked. “Because I was there when mortals were created. I lent my fire to breathe life into their flesh,” he reminded me. “Mortals were created in the image of the Primals, but they were also given more.” “The ability to feel emotion.” “And free will,” he said. “Fate doesn’t usurp that, no matter how much the Arae probably wish they did in some situations. Fate just sees all the possible outcomes of free will.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.

Y ¿qué pasa si digo que la cosa no empezó de ese modo? -deslizó el pulgar por mi cadera-. Pero que después apareció la luz de la luna y tú, con el pelo suelto, con este vestido, y entonces se me ocurrió la idea de que este sería el sitio ideal para algo de comportamiento totalmente inapropiado.

Cuando me haces caso, tengo la sensación de que las estrellas caerán del cielo.

Why do you even care if I bleed to death? -Poppy

Longing to feel his hot flesh against mine, I roughly remove his jacket and start unbuttoning his shirt. I manage to successfully unbutton two, but my patience wanes, and I roughly pull open Jacob's shirt, sending the remaining buttons scattering across the room.

Fear and bravery are often one and the same. It either makes you a warrior or a coward. The only difference is the person who resides it.

No, I do not think so.” She smiled. “Not you. One who is smaller, weak, often a sick one, yes. But you are a large one, there is more of you. And you have not been long hungry, with only bad things to eat." She rubbed a hand against her cheek. “What it does is not to hurt the body, the flesh of the body. It eats at the nerves. And in the brain it first merely dulls the fire as if to fill one's head with smoke—that is the only way I know how to say it. And that is why you said strange things and did not think them strange. But in time it burns too deeply and eats too much at the little nerves.

Debra Bokur has written an immersive, thoroughly researched tale of mystery and mythology that will enlighten as well as entertain. It’s honestly been a while since I’ve wanted to be able to physically join the cast of a novel I’m reading, but The Fire Thief had me longing to solve mysteries with Kali and crew in the flesh. Kali herself is a terrific addition to the world of police procedurals, an original and unconventional heroine who is easy to root for. I can’t wait to read more about her!

According to their sacred texts, the earth was created in seven stages. First, the sky came into being—this was an inverted bowl of beautiful stone. Second, the water was created at the bottom of the sky shell, and then third, the earth that floated on water. To this the gods added one plant, one animal, and a bull, and then in the sixth stage, man. Fire was added in the seventh stage, pervading the entire world and residing in seen and unseen places. As a final act of creation the gods assembled and performed the first sacrifice. The primordial plant, the bull, and the man were crushed and from them the vegetable, animal, and human realms were created and populated the earth. New life and death were created, and the world was set in motion.5 The Noble Ones performed rituals that reenacted this primordial sacrifice to maintain cosmic order and ensure the continuation of the lifecycle. Libations were performed in the home, for example, of water or fire to return these vital elements to the gods to support them, and a perpetual fire was kept burning. The Indo-Iranians revered life, and like all pre-axial peoples, they felt a strong affinity between themselves and animals. They ate only consecrated animal flesh that had been offered to the gods with prayers to ensure the animal’s safe return to the soul of the bull. They believed the soul of the bull was the life energy of the animal world, whose spirit was energized through their sacrifice of animal blood. This nourished the deity and helped the gods look after the animal world and ensured plenty.6 The “catholicity” of the Noble Ones, like that of many of the pre-axial religions, was a consciousness of connectivity to the plants, the animals, the sky, and to the whole of nature. They believed gods or spirits in nature influenced human action, and in turn, human action (and ritual) had its effects on nature. Their sense of the whole was a sense of belonging to a web of life guided by supernatural forces or deities. All things shared the same breadth of life—animals, trees, humans. All things were bound together.

moved down to her waist. She slid up against my body like a fluid, her lips parted and her head thrown back as I found her mouth with mine and strained her to me. We clung to each other, our bodies molding together until she pulled her lips from mine. For a moment, she looked up into my face, silently, then her hand went behind my head and pulled it down to hers again. Last night, when I had looked at her she had seemed beautiful and cool, relaxed and almost lethargic in her movements. She was different now, close against me, her long body moving hungrily, her lips searching my mouth and her tongue darting and curling. I slid my hands over the swell of her hips, up the arching curve of her back and gripped the fragile straps at her shoulders. In a moment, she moved away from me, dropped her arms to her sides and let me ease the dress from her shoulders and down over her breasts while she looked at me, breathing through her mouth. When I let go of the cloth and pressed my hands against the smoothness of her, she moved her fingers briefly at the side of the dress, then slid it down over her hips, let it fall and stepped from it, naked, toward me. I picked her up, carried her to the divan and lowered her to it, fumbled with my clothes and then sank to the divan to lie full-length beside her, reaching for her with my lips and my hands and my body. Ayla placed both her palms against my chest and whispered almost inaudibly, "Wait, Shell." For what seemed a long time she held me from her, then she smiled. Her eyes closed. "Hold me. Love me." When I pulled her close her arms went around me and she pressed the length of her body almost violently against mine. Her lips were moist and clinging as they kissed me and pressed against my flesh and nibbled at my skin, and the long fingernails traced fire down my spine. Then she was softness, an incredible softness, every touch of her hands, her breasts, her thighs, a velvet softness, and warmth that swallowed me, enveloped me, for an immeasurable time.