欧宝娱乐

“June laughs. "I have to say, you look better than most people I see. I've heard a lot about you."

"I hear about you a lot too," Eden replies in a rush, "mostly from Daniel. He thinks you're really hot.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“脭, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?”
― Roman Payne

“The way you move is incredible.鈥� Ren drew me back to press against him. His fingers slid down to the curve of my hips, rocking our bodies in rhythm with the heavy bass. The sensation of being molded against the hard narrow line of his hips threatened to overwhelm me. We were hidden in the mass of people, right? The Keepers couldn鈥檛 see?
I tried to steady my breath as Ren kept us locked together in the excruciatingly slow pulse of the music. I closed my eyes and leaned back into his body; his fingers kneaded my hips, caressed my stomach. God, it felt good.
My lips parted and the misty veil slipped between them, playing along my tongue. The taste of flower buds about to burst into bloom filled my mouth. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to melt into Ren. The surge of desire terrified me. I had no idea if the compulsion to draw him more tightly around my body emerged from my own heart or from the succubi鈥檚 spellcraft. This couldn鈥檛 happen!
I started to panic when he bent his head, pressing his lips against my neck. My eyes fluttered and I struggled to focus despite the suffocating heat that pressed down all around me. His sharpened canines traced my skin, scratching but not breaking the surface. My body quaked and I pivoted in his arms, pushing against his chest, making space between us.
鈥淚鈥檓 a fighter, not a lover,鈥� I gasped.
鈥淵ou can鈥檛 be both?鈥� His smile made my knees buckle.”
― Andrea Cremer, Nightshade

“We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“We are the centuries... We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do 鈥� Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries. Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon鈥檚 slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens 鈥� and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn鈥檛 the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! 鈥� an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed - selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful - we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic - and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It was cold out here in this world beyond childhood.”
― Leslie W.P. Garland, The Bat (The Red Grouse Tales) - A coming of age story involving a search after truth, doubt and a bat!

“Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man.”
― Clarence Darrow

“There is a common superstition that 鈥渟elf-respect鈥� is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“You were patient all this time. I had to find myself first; I had to remember who I was and become the person I was meant to be. You have been there for me patiently while I searched for you, even when I didn't know I was looking for you, you were there.”
― Rachel Higginson, Fearless Magic

“I鈥檓 scared of him. I鈥檓 disgusted by the vile monster he becomes, this beast he lets out. But I still love him. I鈥檇 still do anything for him. I can鈥檛 just turn off my heart. I want to, I do, but I can鈥檛. I love him with everything I have and I hate myself for it. Because it鈥檚 wrong to love him, I know. It鈥檚 so wrong.”
― Karina Halle, On Every Street

“If there were only success in your life, you would not learn anything. Leadership is experience and you are still young. You still have much to learn about our people and war; it should not come easy to you. If it did, you would be robbed of life's most valuable teacher.”
― Rachel Higginson, Fearless Magic

“Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.”
― Peter Redgrove, The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real: Our Uncommon Senses and Their Common Sense

“Noah's mom and dad were academics and socially inept, so Noah had never invited her over to his house because his parents wouldn't like it. And Eden had never invited Noah over to her house because she didn't want him to die.”
― Samantha Young, Blood Will Tell

“Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tune
We're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it's a long road out of Eden
(...)
Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it's a long road out of Eden”
― The Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden

“In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved.

Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else鈥檚 animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation.

Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.”
― William H. McNeill

“I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil."

Lady Alice Rowhedge”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“God was never created the economy.
Men found it after banished from Eden.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“As we reread Genesis 2...we immediately understand WHAT is 'crafty' about the serpent's question in Genesis 3. God did NOT in fact say in Genesis 2, 'You MUST NOT EAT from any tree in the garden' (3:1). What God did say was almost exactly the opposite: 'You ARE FREE TO EAT from any tree in the garden' (except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 2:16). The vocabulary of God in Genesis 2 indicates freedom and blessing. The vocabulary of the serpent in Genesis 3 indicates prohibition and restriction. The serpent's ploy is to suggest to the woman that God is really not so good after all. He shifts attention away from all that God in his generosity has provided for his creatures in creation and onto the one thing that God has for the moment explicitly withheld.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“It is idle to say there is no such garden. Everyone recognises the same nostalgia... Paradise is neither a moment nor a place; it is a condition. So when the lover calls to his or her beloved to come into the garden, it is, in the final implication, a summons to overcome to human condition.”
― Richard Cavendish, The Tarot

“And thus the... valley became a garden again, and the inheritance, which had been lost by cruelty, was regained by love.”
― John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River; or, The Black Brothers, a Legend of Stiria. Illustrated by Richard Doy

“With animals I feel I am Adam's son; the heir of him to whom dominion was given over "every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
― Charlotte Bront毛, Shirley

“If this was indeed the ancient land of Eden, then not even a memory of its former splendour remained.”
― Storm Constantine, Stealing Sacred Fire

“Having a Pretty Woman moment.

Be more specific, she answers.

Were you shunned from stores or are you in a bubble bath?”
― Ivy Owens, Scandalized

“Hey, can you do me a favor?"
"Anything."
"Will you... Will you call me by my name?"
She beams, her face brighter than the sun. He realizes just how fitting her name is. She's his ray of sunshine, his garden of Eden. She's a breath of fresh mountain air. She's the warmth of a calm fire in the middle of a dark winter evening. She's absolutely everything to him, so when she opens her mouth to say his name, the world suddenly clicks into place and makes sense.
"Shang," she whispers, so soft, so sweet.”
― Katrina Kwan, Knives, Seasoning, & A Dash of Love

“There is an important insight contained in the book of Genesis, concerning the loss of eros when the body takes over. Adam and Eve have partaken of the forbidden fruit, and obtained the 鈥榢nowledge of good and evil鈥� 鈥� in other words the ability to invent for themselves the code that governs their behaviour. God walks in the garden and they hide, conscious for the first time of their bodies as objects of shame. This 鈥榮hame of the body鈥� is an extraordinary feeling, and one that no animal could conceivably have. It is a recognition of the body as in some way alien 鈥� the thing that has wandered into the world of objects as though of its own accord, to become the victim of uninvited glances. Adam and Eve have become conscious that they are not only face to face, but joined in another way, as bodies, and the objectifying gaze of lust now poisons their once innocent desire. Milton鈥檚 description of this transition, from the pure eros that preceded the fall, to the polluted lust that followed it, is one of the great psychological triumphs in English literature. But how brilliantly and succinctly does the author of Genesis cover the same transition! By means of the fig leaf Adam and Eve are able to rescue each other from the worst: to ensure, however tentatively, that they can still be face to face, even if the erotic has now been privatized and attached to the private parts.

In his well-known fresco of the expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio shows the distinction between the two shames 鈥� that of the body, which causes Eve to hide her sexual parts, and that of the soul, which causes Adam to hide his face. Like the girl in Goya鈥檚 picture, Adam hides the self; Eve shows the self in all its confused grief, but still protects the body 鈥� for that, she now knows, can be tainted by others鈥� eyes.

I have dwelt on the phenomenon of the erotic because it illustrates the importance of the face, and what is conveyed by the face, in our personal encounters, even in those encounters motivated by what many think to be a desire that we share with other animals, and which arises directly from the reproductive strategies of our genes. In my view sexual desire, as we humans experience it, is an inter-personal response 鈥� one that presupposes self-consciousness in both subject and object, and which singles out its target as a free and responsible individual, able to give and withhold at will. It has its perverted forms, but it is precisely the inter-personal norm that enables us to describe them as perverted. Sexual relations between members of other species have, materially speaking, much in common with those between people. But from the intentional point of view they are entirely different. Even those creatures who mate for life, like wolves and geese, are not animated by promises, by devotion that shines in the face, or by the desire to unite with the other, who is another like me. Human sexual endeavour is morally weighted, as no animal endeavour can be. And its focus on the individual is mediated by the thought of that individual as a subject, who freely chooses, and in whose first person pespective I appear as he or she appears in mine. To put it simply, and in the language of the Torah, human sexuality belongs in the realm of the covenant.”
― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures