Daily Quotes #994 My education never stopped, for which I was grateful. I learned about man travelling to the moon. I learned about the Cold War and Monty Python and the Beatles. Sadly, I even learned about reality TV and the Kardashians, which so put me off my game that I spent a month after that convincing a graduate student in modern literature to read Infinite Jest at my feet, just so I could recover some of my intelligence. I saw the realms of the gods come to life in cinema, and felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when the only theater we had sprang from our own imaginations as we listened to epic tales recounted in court or around a campfire. This new art was in some ways a lessening evolution for the human race, but I wasn't so opposed to it that I didn't watch The Avengers movie three times. Thank the gods for iPads and suggestible minds. And for Robert Downey, Jr. Yum.

Daily Quotes #993 It was a strange revelation for me, to realize that for all the time that I had been trapped in stone, Eryx had been living in the world, loving and fighting and watching generations die in pain and glory. None of his offspring had inherited his immortality, and it wore on him. He was so much older than I in all the ways that mattered, and I felt helpless to make anything better. What did we share now, except an ancient promise and a strange, emotional interdependence? Hardly anything. Tiny pieces of history obscured by years of absence.

Daily Quotes #992 And so it went for centuries, for over a thousand years. Eryx came, he tried to free me, he failed. We spoke of alchemy and black magic, of new gods and new crimes. He brought me modern inventions to marvel at, things he found in distant lands or objects that he himself had created. When he told me the world was actually round, I laughed and called him senile. When he proved it to me with an astrolabe, delighting in the science that he had always craved, the smug look on his face made me laugh all over again.

Daily Quotes #991 I'd never heard that being turned into stone was anything other than a death sentence, but here I was, pondering my life, frozen in time. Ligia convinced Brasidas to make me, and my fellows, part of a temple to Hecate, her patron goddess, and there we stood; a testament to the power of the gods and the rashness of men.

Call for gelled memories