1. "His mother was Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry (and daughter of Memory), and his father was Apollo, the god of the sun and music."
2. "From an evolutionary standpoint, we don't yet understand its existence."
3. "Land that was once lush, green rain forest is now barren, littered with dead trees."
4. "Details concerning his early life are sparse, although it appears as though his mother and aunts -- the Muses -- taught him to sing and play the lyre."
5. "If they hadn't been forced to marry and procreate, there would certainly be less of them. It's a problem that would simply fix it itself if you left it alone."
6. "The man, he thought, was clearly a faggot."
7. "'I have a lot of sex and it's really, really gay' -- Keith Charles"
8. "Eurydice, famous for her beautiful voice, fled into the forest, where the poisonous snake bit her, and she died. Orpheus, equally famous for his beautiful music, had accompanied her. When she died, the whole world wept: the stones, the trees, and the waters."
9. "'Can Animals Be Gay?' -- The New York Times"
10. "The researchers found that the men who completed the friendship puzzles were 26 percent more likely to be open to the idea compared to the men in the other two groups."
11. "Only rarely before the internet-era did people record their private thoughts. This simple fact renders the study of such behavior almost impossible for historians."
12. "Although it was not considered a major offense during the early Roman Empire, it came to be viewed as unacceptable as Christianity developed."
13. "Often the first plant to grow from a fresh lava flow, the tree is known for its resilience. That's what makes a recent discovery all the more tragic: the tree is dying."
14. "As I scrolled through descriptions of paranormal entities, extraterrestrials, and ancient immortals (or gods) returning to a society they had once abandoned -- this latter category often said to exude a glow like the one I had seen -- I recognized a frustration in myself I associated with the friends and loved ones of victims who realize that finding a perpetrator does not undo the crime."
15. "In the 11th century C.E., the Doctor of the Church, St. Peter Damian, wrote an extended attack, portraying it as a counter-rational force undermining morality, religion, and society itself, and in need of strong suppression lest it spread even and especially among clergy."
16. "Herodotus claimed they had learned it from the Greeks."
17. "The females stare into each other's eyes while mating, which macaques hardly ever do outside of sexual contexts."
18. "On April 12, the remains of a man were found at the base of a seaside cliff, washed in with the tide. The body was discovered in an advanced state of decomposition. After the forensic examination, it was determined that the victim was between twenty-eight and thirty-three, five foot ten, and that the cause of death was not drowning but massive cerebral contusion. The victim's genitals had been severed from the body. He wasn't carrying identification. He was dressed in black plants, which were pulled down around his ankles, a white shirt, and tennis shoes. Car keys were found in one of the pockets. His description didn't match that of any man missing. He had probably been dead for a week. The case was shelved."
19. "He struck me as a fudge packer."
20. "For instance, otoacoustic emissions, which are barely detectable sounds in the inner ear, are believed to have their levels set prenatally and are consistently different in males and females, suggesting the handiwork of hormone exposure. But lesbians show male-type patterns. Then there are people with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH, the result of having been exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone during the prenatal period. Adult women with CAH have higher rates of lesbianism than the general population."
21. "Lesbianism."
22. "Orpheus, turn away from the swan maidens with their leaden eyes and listen to me. The river is wide, but we have much to discuss and time is short. I, too, remember the day your father gave you your lyre. You were so happy. You played very well. True, it was bittersweet to be reminded that your life was passing quickly, and I was not pleased to hear that Apollo had pushed his God on you at such an impressionable age. But then I looked up and saw a cormorant flying across the sun. Here, in this perfect creature, I thought, was proof that Nature offered us more inspiration than your father’s amorphous God."
23. "'We promise that something is forever, when it is really only as long as it takes for us to tire of it.' -- Laura Palmer"
24. "Patient zero was probably in a lush, wild district where officials started getting calls from distraught landowners in the area. The bright, flowered trees had withered mysteriously and died in a matter of weeks. Groves of aging trees, which can live for thousands of years, often die off together when they reach old age, but these young trees had turned brown and wilted. More calls started coming in, all reporting the same problem: the trees were dying, fast."
25. "One study, involving tape-recordings of gay and straight men, found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience."
26. "It mostly comes down to this: what did it really mean for people to sleep together in small beds? The practice was habitual, a convention of friendship and comradeship."
27. "He wore shorts and a white T-shirt, the sleeves of which wrapped tightly around his upper arms. The bottom hem didn’t completely cover his hairy gut, which hung out over the top of his shorts. His calves and thighs were muscular and hircine."
28. "Because they were such a male-centered society, they wrote little about women, especially lesbians."
29. "The New York Times also prepared a 22-minute video on his life that did not mention it."
30. "To express our nascent faith, we needed a god of escape."
31. "We were all magical beings in a magical landscape."
32. "Terrorists capture people and brainwash them. In our society, we’re these captives."
33. "There is of course no causal relationship between disapproval of homosexuality and mass murder."
34. "Gangs of teenagers hunted gay men for sport, sometimes forcing them off the cliffs to their deaths. But the police, many of whom had a reputation for hostility toward gay men, often carried out perfunctory investigations that overlooked the possibility of homicide. Now the police are reviewing hundreds of deaths to determine whether they should be classified as anti-gay hate crimes."
35. "The three factors of religious fundamentalism, orthodox Christianity, and right-wing authoritarianism also intercorrelate with each other."
36. "He retracted his confession, stating that he was not alone on that fatal night, and that he was accompanied by a gang of young men who massacred Pasolini, whose body was discovered beaten, bloodied, and run over by the car beside a football field. Splinters of bloodied wood lay around."
37. "Not only are the maternal relatives of gay men more attractive, more fertile, and subject to fewer complications during pregnancy, the study also found these women are extroverts and generally happier. If you're the mother of a gay man, you're pretty awesome!"
38. "Sleep begins to cover her swimming eyes, and she reaches her hands out, towards him, before she falls back into the mists."
39. "'Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison and the crime is how much we hate ourselves.' -- Angela Chase"
40. "It’s a fundamental part of the intellectual foundation. Look closely and you can see the whole history of civilized life."
41. "On August 17, the remains of two bodies were found in an abandoned car. The corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition. Both victims were constrained by rope and duct tape was found covering their eyes and mouths. After the forensic examination, it was determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation. One victim was between thirty-one and thirty-six, and the second between thirty-seven and forty. The genitals of each man had been severed. Neither victim was carrying identification. Their descriptions did not match that of any missing person. They had probably been dead for a few months. No suspects were identified."
42. "He held himself aloof from women and eventually took to living in the forests near the river, where he sang his sad songs to the trees, which were charmed by him. One day, a group of women found him singing on the banks of the river and beat him to death."
43. "Christians can, and should, minister to homosexuals in a kind, yet firm manner."
44. "They were basically considered antisocial, low-level criminals and lowlife types who did disgusting things and should not be surprised that they got injured and even killed."
45. "Another hypothesis is that the hair-whorl patterns on gay heads are more likely to go counterclockwise."
46. "The gods slowly exhaled as the pair began to play their songs, notes dispersing out over the meadows above the water, where they collected in a crashing, sparkling reflection of the sea. Orpheus and Eurydice were twin angels, completely indifferent to their audience until they had finished, and slowly walked to the edge of the stage, accepting their initiation into a kind of immortality that had nothing to do with the gods."
47. "The first TV commercial featuring an ordinary, gay couple is an Ikea ad showing two men shopping for furniture."
48. "The Nazis persecuted effeminate homosexuals, but Hitler recruited homosexuals to make up his stormtroopers. They were his enforcers and his thugs. He discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits to the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict. So he surrounded himself with them. Virtually all of the stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals."
49. "The gangs were adolescents -- teenage boys and sometimes girls -- who looked for victims to harass and assault at cruising spots where gay men were known to meet, including secluded, poorly lit paths along the cliffs. The gang members called it fag bashing. Hundreds of men over the decades were thrown to their deaths by these gangs. The vast majority were ruled suicides and not investigated by the police."
50. "He also exhibited behavior called childhood gender nonconformity. That meant he rejected boy-typical activities like the rough-and-tumble play favored by his brother and instead showed a strong and persistent preference for girl-typical pursuits, such as playing with Barbie dolls and dressing up in princess costumes."
51. "One of the most popular sitcoms of all time features a lesbian wedding of two supporting characters. However, the couple is not shown kissing at the end of the ceremony. The episode is titled 'The One with the Lesbian Wedding.' "
52. "His sandals scraped against the ground as he shifted his weight toward me. He placed one of his hands on my shoulder, where it rested for a second or two before spidering down over the front of my shirt toward my waist. I felt his mouth against my neck, followed by an animal lick of his heavy, fat tongue."
53. "'War is our imperative, so we will fight.' -- Helena Cain"
54. "Since the mysterious illness was discovered, its effects have been felt by business owners, artists, cultural practitioners, government officials and dozens, if not hundreds, of scientists, many of whom have relocated to help combat the devastation. Simply put, the disease is one of the most significant crises in history."
55. "I couldn’t bring myself to mention that the man they sought had been glowing or that he had seemed to gallop through the trees. I knew they wouldn’t believe what I could not fathom myself."
56. "The Vatican's statement about the shooting, for example, referred only to 'innocent victims.' The Southern Baptist Convention’s resolution read, 'We regard those affected by this tragedy as fellow image-bearers of God and our neighbors.' Shortly thereafter, the Convention approved a resolution committed to various forms of discrimination against LGBT people."
57. "Among those killed was a black transgender woman who was beaten and shot. The man charged in her murder went on to kill a man believed to be gay less than a week later."
58. "Healthy trees, many hundreds if not thousands of years old, have died within a few days to a few weeks."
59. "Eurydice's mother was the daughter of Dionysus and one of the ancient trees. Her skin glowed like a shaft of dappled light and her hair possessed the earthy, russet tones of autumn leaves. She and her sisters were known as Flower Singers, thanks to their ability to call forth plants from the slumbering depths of even the harshest winter and to help them bloom throughout the summer."
60. "Such perverted people do not exist in our country."
61. "As much as I like it, I won't be able to make it fly over here. In any case, we are overdue for some lunch!"
62. "Generations have been raised to associate being gay with being evil."
63. "Members of the same profession recognize each other instinctively; so do those with the same vice."
64. "We had seen the baby boomers veer from ridiculous idealism to cynical, neoconservative greed."
65. "They have been ransacking history, suggesting that some of history’s most preeminent figures were homosexuals."
66. "Statistically, for instance, gay men and lesbians have about a 50 percent greater chance of being left-handed or ambidextrous than straight men or women."
67. "The remains were found in an advanced state of decomposition in the basement of an abandoned storage facility. After a forensic examination, it was determined that the victim was around fifteen years old, five foot eight and at the time of his death approximately 140 pounds. The cause of death was internal bleeding caused by blunt force of an object inserted through the anus. The case was shelved after no matches appeared in any missing persons database."
68. "The trees are usually the first to grow on new lava."
69. "If a couple had asked him to design a specialty cake that read 'Congrats on the abortion, Jenny!' I’m certain he would have refused them as well, even though abortions are legal."
70. "Hyacinthus had the eyes of a fawn and a lean, muscular body that attracted much admiration. His skin did not glow in the manner of the gods, but at fifteen, he had arrived at that period of mortal adolescence that seems so improbable and intoxicating. Wherever he went, a hush followed. Two gods became particularly infatuated. One was Zephyrus, god of the western wind, and the second was Apollo. Zephyrus tried to entice the young singer with soft breezes and gentle caresses, while Apollo gave him ambrosia collected from the Hesperides in order to extend this golden period of his life."
71. "It’s not the people, it’s the message."
72. "The detentions began after a man was stopped by police and the arresting officers discovered contact information for other men on his phone."
73. "She can weld, make maple syrup, and even earned a knighthood making medieval costumes. Although she works as a veterinarian, her love of all things ancient led her to minor in classical history. Now she spends her free time writing m/m erotic romance."
74. "The tree has a superior capacity for extending its roots vertically and can grow efficiently in cracks and fissures, taking advantage of residual moisture after rainfall. The tree has the capability to close its stomata, or breathing pores, to 'hold its breath' when toxic volcanic gases are blown in its direction."
75. "'People who have been oppressed take on the characteristics of their oppressors' -- RuPaul"
76. "Homophobia -- fear and hatred of homosexuals -- remains the central organizing principle of our modern cultural definition of manhood."
77. "Eurydice, who learned to sing from the trees with whom she spent her childhood, had the temperament of a Nymph and the body of a mortal, which meant she could not flourish in society. She was the last of the Flower Singers. She needed to experience the death that Orpheus, equally uncomfortable in society but for different reasons, was chasing in her.”
78. "The same redemption available to all sinners is available to homosexuals. They, too, may become new creations in Christ."
79. "The red, orange, and yellow blossoms are a symbol of Pele, the goddess of fire and volcanoes."
80. "This is a macho country full of faggots."
81. “'The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.' -- Buffy Summers”
82. "Growing up, men denigrate other men for things like dancing, singing, cooking (inside), being emotional, owning cats, caring about clothing, studying too much, being incompetent, or not having success with girls."
83. "On the wedding night, the woman dressed up as a soldier so that her husband wouldn’t be completely confused."
84. "Since there is no treatment or cure for the disease at this time, the main tactic is to prevent the disease from spreading."
85. "'Sometimes lost is where you need to be.' -- Kara Thrace."
86. "Military psychiatrists, new to the ranks, warned of the 'psychopathic personality disorders' that would make homosexuals unfit to fight. Then they devised supposedly foolproof guides to ferret them out: an effeminate flip of hand or a certain nervousness when standing naked before an officer."
87. "There's no rational reason why disapproving of the sexual behavior of others should coincide with nationalism -- the belief that your country is better than all others -- yet increasingly it does."
88. "Keeping the subject hidden has always had an intrinsic appeal in a country with puritanical roots."
89. "At the other end of the spectrum, 33 percent estimate it as more than 25 percent."
90. "Gays who don’t fit the common stereotype are marginalized for not living up to expectations, which can have an impact on mental health. Gays who do fit are marginalized for adhering to a stereotype, which can have an equally damaging impact on mental health."
91. "It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world."
92. "As a minority, we’re vulnerable to being brainwashed into thinking that we’re somehow defective or immoral, which is the definition of terror, except it’s a quiet, subversive, and constant form of psychological terror. Which is ironic, given that the biggest loudmouths in our country today -- the ones who call everyone else terrorists -- are actually terrorists themselves. I mean, have you looked at those demons in the Senate? Or that ghoulish clown Ronald Reagan? Then you know what I mean. Terrorists by any definition."
93. "Republicans and conservatives are much less likely to consider gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable."
94. "Next time you pass by one, take a moment to appreciate the tree that shapes the volcanic landscape."
95. "Belief doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a reflection of how we’ve lived and, more often, how we’ve suffered."
96. "The network cancelled the series after two low-rated seasons. The show debuted to just 338,000 viewers and ratings were even worse in Season Two, which averaged 240,000 viewers with a 0.1 rating in the 18-49 demo."
97. "It had been prophesied that a mortal daughter of a Nymph would lead the gods to the Land of the Dead. Eurydice’s voice resonated with this power of promise and destruction, and the seeds of this belief began to grow."
98. "What if homosexuality could be prevented? That could turn out to be a big blow for the gay-rights movement."
99. "She also knew that something important was about to happen."
100. "Part of his skull was reduced to powder during the attack."
101. "I’m not offended as a gay man, just as someone who watches way too much TV and expects some of it to be well-written."
102. "I knew what the words meant, because he had taught me. Everything is changing, and we along with it."
103. "The incredibly resilient tree grows out of seemingly solid lava flows. It is polymorphic, meaning it has no common shape but can be fully grown at 1 foot or 200 feet."
104. "Five weeks later, the tree -- like hundreds of thousands of others that would follow -- was dead."
105. "Don’t create a gay character just to die."
106. "The Muses left Apollo to go out and light the world."
107. "The mentality that God gave Christianity a 'masculine feel' reaches its zenith in the best-selling evangelical Left Behind books, which transform the apocalypse into an action thriller for Christians to show off their fighting prowess. (In the film adaptation, the hero is played by Nicolas Cage.)"
108. "A hotline was flooded with messages from people who had survived the camps."
109. "An old-growth forest -- also termed primary forest forest, virgin forest, primeval forest, late-seral forest, or ancient woodland -- is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features and might be classified as a climax community."
110. "She stared into the passing blur of forest and imagined the skyline of New York City."
111. "This is a list of LGBT characters in modern written fiction."
112. "When Eurydice first sang for the Muses, the immortal sisters knew that the mortal's voice was like none they had ever heard. Eurydice didn’t translate the language of the trees, and -- unlike other Nymphs -- she didn’t even speak it, but she transposed the melody of the forest into song."
113. "Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?"
114. "For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."
115. "Men fucking each other threatens so many people -- and especially men who aren’t attuned to ever being penetrated, which is an example of how a physical limitation can reflect a psychological one -- but this fear offers power; not financial or political power, but the ability to define oneself instead of being defined by someone else, which is the basis of any legitimate faith."
116. "Let us one last time whisper to the silent earth, we are flowing, and to the flashing water say: we are." 
#GODS WILL BE RELEASED BY FICTION ADVOCATE ON JULY 18, 2017. BUY IT HERE. IF YOU ARE A FELLOW BLOGGER/BOOK-CLUB PERSON/ANIMAL LOVER WHO WOULD LIKE A REVIEW COPY PLEASE GET IN TOUCH (MY FULL NAME NO PERIODS AT GMAIL) AND WE WILL WORK SOMETHING OUT. THANK YOU FOR READING :)