Preternatural Quotes & Sayings

I wasn't built for running away from monsters. I wanted desperately to run toward them
track them down, kill them. Luckily, I was used to restraining myself, used to acting human even when I wasn't, and the human part of my brain reminded me that right now, preternatural beasties weren't exactly my primary concern. Someone had made a strong attempt at killing me this morning ... — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

You carry the weight of the preternatural world on those big shoulders of yours. But your heart is even bigger, and the burden you harbor there heavier. — N.D. Jones

A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. — Junot Diaz

not human nature with perfect preternatural gifts such as it was in unfallen Adam. — Peter Kreeft

Richard either didn't hear me, or chose to ignore it. Smart, handsome, junior high science teacher, degree in preternatural biology, what more could i ask for? Give me a minute and I'd think of something. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. — Michael Chabon

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them. — Alfred North Whitehead

This preternatural love of rules almost for their own sake punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a German reinsurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn't just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules. — Michael Lewis

He was not only, I soon discovered, a water drinker, but a strict vegetarian, to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility, and sensitiveness of mind. — Charles Kingsley

She protected me. We had the souls of each other. We loved in some realm where the natural and the preternatural meant nothing. — Anne Rice

It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. — G.K. Chesterton

Billy [Ray] is a preternatural enthusiast. He would say things to me like, "Now, let me tell you about Episode 3." I'm a big superstitious, having done television for quite some time, and I would say, "Billy, I can't wait to hear about it, but let's just stay here for right now, see what happens, and enjoy this moment. — Matt Bomer

I sit and ponder my existence: how I'm here, what put me here in these thoughts, these feelings, birthed from a timeless sleep, what it felt like, or rather the lack thereof, to not have been and now to 'be', and suddenly, I realize how absurd I am to exist, the fragility in my understanding of existence; I then wonder why the supernatural, the thought of other beings, of God or of gods, must be distinctly absurd - by which I am no longer sure. 'If I exist and I have made myself absurd to me, then why not they exist while merely believed absurd by me?' Perhaps it is true that in a wandering head, one full of wonders, the natural becomes supernatural and the supernatural becomes preternatural (or rational within the sights of discovery and explanation), just as the return home after a life-long journey feels, for a moment, foreign after the many experiences. — Criss Jami

The conflict between the creatures of Native Lore and the immigration of the European preternatural hosts is hinted at in 'Blood Bound' and reflects the conflicts between the human immigrants and the Indian people who were already here. — Patricia Briggs

Contrary to what you think, not all preternatural beings hang out at the local Supernatural Pub looking for humans and dates. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

There is not a single one of us, no matter how old, that does not have a moral heart, an educated heart, a heart that learned to love while human, and a heart that should have learned ever more deeply to love as preternatural. — Anne Rice

The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses. — Anne Rice

He cut right through the layers of civilization, politeness, and social snobbery to some preternatural female sense that said, "Dominant male. Danger. Power. Sex." Why — Ilona Andrews

I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.
I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it. — John Dolan

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist; - to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image, in preternatural quickness or perception of relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You think this is some sort of comedy going on here?" Collins gave him his tough stare.
A little red spark flared in Barabas's eyes. "Excuse me." He struck with preternatural quickness and yanked a five-foot snake from the counter, an inch away from Tsoi's elbow. Tsoi jumped, clearing half the room in a single bound. The snake body flailed in my lawyer's fist. Barabas jerked the snake to his mouth and bit its neck.
"Jesus Christ!" Collins took a step back. Tsoi clamped her hand over her mouth.
Barabas spat the head onto the counter. "Pit viper - my favorite. Where were we? Ah, yes. You were trying to intimidate me. I apologize for the interruption. Please, resume your staring. — Ilona Andrews

Indeed, much to my parents' surprise, the first word I spoke in this lifetime was "light." Prior to uttering its name, however, I was already searching for light - for my source. Yet despite my preternatural kinship with that spark that lights this and all worlds, for the first two or three decades of my life, I resisted it. — Rod Stryker

So, like, Zeus was just some great big preternatural baby-daddy? — Nicole Peeler

for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since - the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. — C.S. Lewis

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason ... Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. — Ann Coulter

Great, Alexia thought, I have gone from soul sucker to electrical ground. The epithets just get sweeter and sweeter. — Gail Carriger

The duke contents himself mainly with attempting to rule the world and other suchlike nonsense. When one is guiding the patterns of the social universe, a single spinster preternatural is unlikely to cause one undue distress. — Gail Carriger

Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere. — Thomas Hardy

The rulers were using ancient knowledge to manipulate the amygdaloidal primal fear. They ruled through fear, preternatural fear created through soft, invisible waves designed to alternate the brain's almond. They kept the people spellbound — Amira Aly

In addition to localized neural networks, hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to trigger such preternatural experiences, such as the sense of floating and flying stimulated by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids. These can be found in mandrake and jimsonweed and were used by European witches and American Indian shamans, probably for this very purpose.32 Dissociative anesthetics such as the ketamines are also known to induce out-of-body experiences. Ingestion of methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) may bring back long-forgotten memories and produce the feeling of age regression, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT) - also known as "the spirit molecule" - causes the dissociation of the mind from the body and is the hallucinogenic substance in ayahuasca, a drug taken by South American shamans. People who have taken DMT report "I no longer have a body," and "I am falling," "flying," or "lifting up. — Michael Shermer

This is why you don't call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever. If I'd doubted that rule
and I was fairly sure I never had
I certainly never would have again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities ... The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them
figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal [where they connected me to] the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings ... — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The nations, and the sects, of the Roman world, admitted with equal credulity, and similar abhorrence, the reality of that infernal art [witchcraft], which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind ... They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt. — Edward Gibbon

The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him. — William Hazlitt

It's what I call common sense, properly understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn't the legend that I disbelieve - it's the history. — G.K. Chesterton

I smiled. You mean like a psychic imprint? I know your assistant director of the Preternatural Division, and I mean no disrespect, but I never got the feeling you believed in magic as an investigative tool.'
From the book 9 Incarnate - Caitlin Diggs Series — Gary Starta

Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing ... but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise. — Anne Rice

He has been mad for you these many months, ever since you prodded him in the nether regions with a hedgehog. — Gail Carriger

I really did not expect any Grace to answer, for the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high noon, and that no circumstances of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachination; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise. — Charlotte Bronte

Facilis descensus Averni," he whispered, his ominous and preternatural words striking her very soul. "The descent to Hell is easy. — Sylvain Reynard