Quackenbush Quotes & Sayings

I have long seen my spirituality as personal, to the degree that I harbor a slight mistrust for anyone who practices similarly. It is as though they are admitting to have on the same cut and color of underwear I do. It may be true, but I don't like to share these details with strangers. — Thomm Quackenbush

A woman steps out of the back door after an hour of him sitting. Younger than either of us, blonde with a tinge of gray at her temples, the light creases of age in the corners of her eyes, beautiful in the untouchable way of mothers who are our exemplars for what we will admire in women when we come of age. — Thomm Quackenbush

Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles. — Thomm Quackenbush

The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality. — Thomm Quackenbush

Roselyn corseted Shane in her second best bodice, causing Shane to question in gasps how women who could not heal cracked ribs managed the feat of breathing.
"Breathing," Roselyn assured her, "was overrated. — Thomm Quackenbush

Cliches work by appealing to the collective unconscious. They are the Pachbel's Canon in D of writing, something familiar the talented can riff off to create a distinct work. — Thomm Quackenbush

The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney - not that we had one - suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet in his holly, jolly keister. — Thomm Quackenbush

I'm a holiday Christian at best and I'd never given much thought to demons. They were an adult version of the boogieman hiding in every kid's closet. — Thomm Quackenbush

We are given these niches, small worlds of our own populated by only a handful, where we feel understood. Our bubble worlds bump into innumerable others daily, but there is so little cause to allow their integrity to be breached. — Thomm Quackenbush

Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength. — Thomm Quackenbush

We need the life ... We need to know what we take left someone weaker or dead. It reminds us what we were. The Hunger when you start out, it isn't in the stomach or brain. You want to kill because you hate that others get to live. — Thomm Quackenbush

The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination. — Thomm Quackenbush

Private moments held not a candle to coitus, not even the expensive kind of candle that made the whole room smell of far off seasons. — Thomm Quackenbush

At least the more modern princesses had the guts to do something aside from clean and wait to be rescued. They armed themselves and tried to provide good role models to impressionable girl tykes. It riled some innate feminist ... that the princesses were strongest when they were acting like the men ... — Thomm Quackenbush

My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I can't help but whisper comments to them. — Thomm Quackenbush

She had loved and been loved, but she felt in this moment of embrace as though there were nothing in her not shaped by love, from the chipped purple paint on her toenails to the fuzz in her belly button to her scarecrow hair escaping from Roselyn's ministrations and unguents. She was love, standing on love, breathing love, digesting love. — Thomm Quackenbush

Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn't splash back on us. — Thomm Quackenbush

Like any man, he had no real protection from an unsolicited kiss from a pretty woman, even one he had just murdered. — Thomm Quackenbush

She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved. — Thomm Quackenbush

The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society ... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself. — Thomm Quackenbush

Summer flings always seemed amazing in movies, though that might be because the leading man did not ever call his romantic interest dude. — Thomm Quackenbush

As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her. — Thomm Quackenbush

The most compassionate thing I can do for them is continuing to see their potential. They need to know that people are not going to abandon them because of their bad behavior. Only in the security of this can they let themselves learn better strategies. — Thomm Quackenbush

In these books, there were spells and rituals for making a living soul something hungry and desperate like him, but he didn't find likelihood in any of them. All it told him was that man was terrified of nothing so much as death. Having died, he could think of dozens of things more worth his fear. — Thomm Quackenbush

Her mother admonished through closed lips, the sound a mother can make mean anything from "pick up your socks" to "we are very disappointed you have murdered those orphans. — Thomm Quackenbush

She had experimented with Wicca eight years ago, found that her spells did not produce the desired results of making her every bully bald and fat, and threw it in the corner of her soul as effete and impractical, as she had with a series of other theological outfits. — Thomm Quackenbush

Now, it's been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That's the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not. — Thomm Quackenbush

Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear. — Thomm Quackenbush

If you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist. — Thomm Quackenbush

Salem has become this ... Mecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, no one practiced anything like witchcraft near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment and land acquisition. — Thomm Quackenbush

Once everyone thought you were crazy, they ignored you even when you told the truth. — Thomm Quackenbush

If you knew the mercy I am showing by not dismembering you where you stand for getting in my way, you would not stop thanking me. — Thomm Quackenbush

[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist. — Thomm Quackenbush

A lonely person on a college campus is never more than a few minutes and a bad decision from company. — Thomm Quackenbush

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, out of the nothing came the Word and the Word was power. Every utterance of the Word gave form to the Void, starting with beings to utter the Word. There was no Adam, no Eve, and no need. What Man named was. — Thomm Quackenbush

Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic. — Thomm Quackenbush

It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength. — Thomm Quackenbush

Do you want me because you love me or because I provide you normality drag? — Thomm Quackenbush

They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead. — Thomm Quackenbush

Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside. — Thomm Quackenbush

If you can't feel the touch of the gods on your own, it greatly behooves you to work on that before some lecher tells you his touch is just as good. — Thomm Quackenbush

She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating. — Thomm Quackenbush

Roselynn appraised Shane as she would an interesting rock, saying nothing. However, Roselynn was the sort much enamored of rocks. — Thomm Quackenbush

It's about Nietzsche's theory of universal debt. Your parents make it possible for you to believe a far better myth than Santa. They let you think that you, as a kid, don't owe the world a thing. The world can give you, even if just for a few minutes, utter joy without requiring anything from you. It's not about consumerism. As far as you know, no one buys you these presents. They come out of nothingness, with fantasies of elves attached. You aren't required to be grateful to your parents or anything like that. They can give to you and nothing is required in return. When you get old enough, when you have kids, you get to enact this myth for them. It has nothing to do with any fat man in a red suit, no matter what we tell ourselves. It's about owing nothing, and then realizing that you have to do this job of perpetuating this ... this fantasy world, whether you like it or not. — Thomm Quackenbush

I narrate the story but he dies off-stage between commercials. A washing machine ad later, we are dressed in our funereal best. We sniffle and indulge in product placement for Kleenex. The credits roll. — Thomm Quackenbush

She was an exotic flower amongst the snowdrifts, out of place, a Technicolor misfit in a monochrome Christmas movie. — Thomm Quackenbush

It seemed inequitable at best that one could and did gain a reputation for things that left one both physically and emotionally unsatisfied. — Thomm Quackenbush

Jasmine had endured enough parochial schooling before middle school to have a residual attachment to the beautiful parts of believing, the certainty of knowing one is loved by something beyond comprehension, but also a niggling fear of those who believed too much in anything they could not touch. Believers were the sort to wave pictures of dead fetuses at her when she went to her gynecologist for a checkup. — Thomm Quackenbush

The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word. — Thomm Quackenbush

Her beauty was enough to get her into most any situation she desired and her tongue - sharp and venomous - was enough to get her out again. — Thomm Quackenbush

If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words. — Thomm Quackenbush

They do not like evidence like that, anything too definite because our first instinct is to find flaws and debunk. They want to be discussed and portrayed, but never proven. They want to be credited as the true makers of the pyramids and lifters of Stonehenge when it had much more to do with the gods who were then extant. — Thomm Quackenbush

We want our delusions and will violently defend these when confronted. We want to believe that the job that is slowly choking us is good, because the effort it would take to change is too terrifying to contemplate. We never want to hear how badly we are being treated in a relationship because we are strong and how dare you suggest we don't know better. — Thomm Quackenbush

[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess. — Thomm Quackenbush

Snow is both our best friend and worst enemy. Best friend because it shows us in a concrete form the paths other have taken to get where they are. Worst enemy because it will tell such tales of us if we chance upon it. I find poetry in snow that cannot be resisted. In a way, it is the closest to time travel most civilians will ever manage. — Thomm Quackenbush

Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire? — Thomm Quackenbush

To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night. — Thomm Quackenbush

Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred. — Thomm Quackenbush

Reciting from rote seems a terrible way to honor the gods and a precise killing of the power of the words. — Thomm Quackenbush

The vampire community has enough problems. We don't need to add petty backbiting to it. — Thomm Quackenbush

Any relationship that developed power dynamics, where she thought she had the right to dictate someone else's behavior or have him dictate hers, was ended almost immediately. She could not stand the thought of hands on her that presumed she belonged to them. — Thomm Quackenbush

My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it. — Thomm Quackenbush

Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town. — Thomm Quackenbush

Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her back into the cold water of life. — Thomm Quackenbush

He wouldn't be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries. — Thomm Quackenbush

The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door. — Thomm Quackenbush

You can't exist on this plane for long purely one thing or another. A totally evil creature is so destructive that it obliterates itself. A totally good one ... the same. So, we mix a bit of coffee with our cream. — Thomm Quackenbush

Man created god upon his thoughts to externalize, to give form to his belief to give a reason for what they could do. The gods stole away the energies, let man believe he was ruled rather than that he rules. — Thomm Quackenbush

If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one under your Yule tree. — Thomm Quackenbush

Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away. — Thomm Quackenbush

Shane never knew how to address her friends' parents. She wanted to call her Mrs. Eliot's Mom, but knew that the cutesiness would not be appreciated. "Mrs. Kaspar" sounded too like a phone solicitor, which would not do after having kissed the circumference of her son's neck. — Thomm Quackenbush

But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter. — Thomm Quackenbush

She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again. — Thomm Quackenbush

You got a vicious animal inside you. It wants to snap, it wants to attack, but it's harmless because some woman fitted a muzzle on it. Now, how do you imagine it feels about that muzzle? How do you think it will regard the woman the moment that muzzle is off, and she is within biting distance? — Thomm Quackenbush

I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest. — Thomm Quackenbush

She is the sort of person who can do things she doesn't know yet. There are things you know you know and you know you don't know and you don't know you know and you don't know you don't know. She may not know what she does know. — Thomm Quackenbush

There is little worse than when the person to whom you want to apologize is having great sex in your room. — Thomm Quackenbush

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin. — Thomm Quackenbush

Sex was this primal connection like no magick she had ever known, even separated by a millimeter of latex. She knew that some combined the two and, while she could see how this would improve the magick, it would dilute the sex. — Thomm Quackenbush

He's the kind of kid who, just looking at him, you know gets bullied by the older boys and takes it out on everyone who is either weaker than him or required to refrain from smacking him. — Thomm Quackenbush

Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one's life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. "It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you."
Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. "I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration. — Thomm Quackenbush

I don't think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I'd want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway. — Thomm Quackenbush

They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities. — Thomm Quackenbush

Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn't need to be. — Thomm Quackenbush

You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls. — Thomm Quackenbush

Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin. — Thomm Quackenbush

Ashlei was free to spout off how much she loved her savior because Jesus was not about to rear back and tell her He did not quite feel the same way, that He had died for the sins of the world just because it was fun and did not want things to be too serious. He was only thirty-three, after all, and might want to martyr himself for other people. — Thomm Quackenbush

The cold reader exploits that the human mind is a whiz at making senses of information, shaping faces out of leaves, finding religious icons on pieces of toast, and letting us believe general sentences and uncertain questions add up to prophesy. — Thomm Quackenbush

I do all I can to let my students feel as normal as possible, as far from institutionalized. I see how easy it is to allow this conveyor belt of incarceration bring them from my facility to an adult detention, often for the rest of their lives. — Thomm Quackenbush

They wouldn't have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way. — Thomm Quackenbush

If I am a pawn in someone else's chess game, you better believe I am going to demand an explanation before being shoved at some rook. I'll play my part, damn it, but I want the courtesy of being asked for my consent! — Thomm Quackenbush

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time. — Thomm Quackenbush

Despite what novels implied, vampirism did not make stalking sexy. — Thomm Quackenbush

She had seen this relationship dying before it ever lived, but allowed optimism and lust to blind her. — Thomm Quackenbush

She did not arrive at Annandale without taking the chisel to herself more than once, without rubbing up against a few boys to smooth an edge or two. — Thomm Quackenbush

Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit. — Thomm Quackenbush

She is an angel, how bad could it be?"
"Ask the first born of Israel when the Pharaoh pissed off Moses. Ask the salty residents of Sodom. Ask anyone who was not Noah or a fish once the Flood rolled in. — Thomm Quackenbush

When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say "blessed be" and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous world, even and especially as I can rattle on about magma cooling, abiogenesis, and natural selection. — Thomm Quackenbush

My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard. — Thomm Quackenbush

She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually. — Thomm Quackenbush