- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. - Peter S. Beagle

I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees.

"Marriage isn't like football, like bocce. One isn't good at it, nobody has a special gift. You stumble along, and if there is enough love — " she smiled at him — "you learn."

Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.