Jim C. Hines

The hotel offered a complimentary continental breakfast. My first thought upon seeing it was rather less than complimentary.

You want to know if it was worth it. I can’t answer that, Isaac. We can know what was, but not what might have been.

“This is the worst excess of conjecture and wishful thinking,” snapped Jackson. “We don’t know if Isaac is capable of any of this.”

“He believes he is,” said Bi Wei.

“I once met a woman who believed she was abducted by aliens who looked like the Teletubbies,” Jackson shot back. “That doesn’t make it true.”

This would be an excellent time for you to shut up.

She didn’t argue. That, more than anything else, told me she hadn’t fully recovered from everything she’d been through. A year ago, she would have argued with me on principle, secure in her teenage sense of immortality and invulnerability.

“It’s not going to come to that,” I said.

“Nobody ever believes it will,” so the driver. “That’s why it does.”

We all know Pastor Tom Briggs is a walking skidmark in a bad suit, and his congregation is a stain on Christians everywhere….

Freedom of speech is easy when it’s speech we approve of. The true test of freedom is what we do when people like Briggs and his ilk mount their soapboxes and and show their asses to the world.

Fortunately, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from mockery and other consequences.

Hon, nobody eats fried chicken because it’s good for them.

I had said before that all stories were magic. It had never occurred to me that all magic was stories.

“Hey, I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“Since when did the devil need your help?”

Change is a difficult, often violent process, both for individuals and for whole species. The more rapidly change, the uglier the conflict.

I knew the one thing that truly mattered. I knew it could be done.