A little something for some of you more godless types to ponder . . . (Please don't read this if you know it will piss you off, thanks!)

"That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain . . . The stain that is there before its mark . . . The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? . . . The inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection . . . Like the Greeks . . . Like their gods. They're petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck-goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears - and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast. To hugely mount a woman as a bull . . . There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness. The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great reality-reflecting religion . . . As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours - theirs [the Greeks]. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man."

Excerpt from The Human Stain by Philip Roth

School is still kicking my butt, and there is so much I wish to create. There is so much to be inspired by . . . But no time . . . So I decided to present you, my dear friends, with little nuggets of ingenious gold I have come across through literature in hopes of inspiring you in the same way as they inspire me. However, don't be concerned, I will only present you with the best and most provocative of works. Please feel free to comment!