Tem Quotes & Sayings

We carry our fears with us wherever we go. We pack them neatly, holding them close because if we lost them, where would we be? — Steve Rasnic Tem

She had gone to sleep on these facts years ago, after a period of much misery, her head resting on them as on a pillow; and she had a great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a condition. Therefore it was that she searched with earnestness for a heading under which to put Mrs. Wilkins, and in this way illumine and steady her own mind; and sitting there looking at her uneasily after her last remark, and feeling herself becoming more and more unbalanced and infected, she decided pro tem, as the vicar said at meetings, to put her under the heading Nerves. It was just possible that she ought to go straight into the category Hysteria, which was often only the antechamber to Lunacy, but Mrs. Arbuthnot had learned not to hurry people into their final categories, having on more than one occasion discovered with dismay that she had made a mistake; and how difficult it had been to get them out again, and how crushed she had been with the most terrible remorse. Yes. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me. — Steve Rasnic Tem

The man on the ceiling casts shadows of flesh, and sometimes the shadows take on lives of their own. — Melanie Tem

YOU'RE A QUEER LITTLE THING," Jesse Dittley decided. "LIKE ONE OF THEM ANTS."
She tipped her head back to look at him. "How do you reckon?"
"THEM ANTS THAT WAS ON THE TELEVISION. IN SOUTH AMERICA OR AFRICA OR INDIA. CARRY TEM TIMES THEIR OWN WEIGHT."
Blue was flattered, but she said sternly, "All ants can carry ten times their own weight, can't they? Normal ants?"
"THSE DID BETTER THAN NORMAL ANTS. WISH I COULD REMEMBER HOW THEY DID BETTER. SO I COUDL TELL YOU."
"Are you trying to say I'm a better sort of ant?"
Jesse Dittley blustered. "DRINK YOUR WATER. — Maggie Stiefvater

Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels' wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again.
-The Man In The Ceiling — Steve Rasnic Tem

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. — John Keats

Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished. — Steve Rasnic Tem

They adored each other; but still the permanent and the immutable subsist. We may love and laugh, pout, clasp hands, smile, and exchange endearments, but that does not affect eternity. Two lovers hide in the dusk of evening, amid flowers and the twittering of birds, and enchant each other with their hearts shinning in their eyes; but the stars in their course still circle through infinite space. — Victor Hugo

If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving. — Steve Rasnic Tem

Be the apostle of the divine Eucharist, like a flame which enlightens and warms, like the Angel of his heart who will go to proclaim him to those who don't know him and will encourage those who love him and are suffering. — Peter Julian Eymard

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Celibacy is not just a matter of not having sex. It is a way of admiring a person for their humanity, maybe even for their beauty. — Timothy Radcliffe

Dr. Phil never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe this was the reason for his survival. — Jeffrey Eugenides

If you don't have a father, you don't miss it, because you don't know what it is. It was really only when I married Wyatt Cooper that I understood what it was like to have a father, because he was just an extraordinary father. — Gloria Vanderbilt

Oranges were the prince's favorite fruit. He always peeled tem himself, and took some pleasure in tearing the bright skin away to expose the soft wedges within. He liked the spray of tiny citrus beads, he liked the tangy taste, and above all he liked that an orange is a fruit to be eaten piece by piece. — Marie Rutkoski

I think there is something lovely when a woman looks well. — Louise Nurding

That's what parenthood was about, wasn't it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn't yours anymore but herself. — Megan Abbott

Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead. — Steve Rasnic Tem

As paredes tem ouvidos. (Portuguese: The walls have ears.) — Madeleine L'Engle

A life was a secret thing, even between a husband and wife. Your secret life was completely your own, and because it was unknown, would never be mourned. The secret life of each individual went unhonored through eternity. — Steve Rasnic Tem

For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky. — Steve Rasnic Tem

Even at pro tem position, do ad rem things! — Anyaele Sam Chiyson

The world is full of horror. Our imaginations struggle to keep up. It would be a poor life without imagining. I'm not sure we can have any salvation, in fact, without imagining. — Steve Rasnic Tem

Everything is dangerous. Even in your dreams. Even if you sleep without dreams. From the moment you jump out of bed and take that first breath. Something terrible might happen. Someone's bound to die before the story is over. You might even fall in love.
-The Man On The Ceiling — Steve Rasnic Tem

Maybe you just don't see your own beauty. — Lena Headey

Stories are masks of God.
That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. — Melanie Tem

They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down. — Michel Faber

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet. — Steve Rasnic Tem

The love we deserve is not necessarily the love we accept... — Steven Aitchison

The strongest presence is so often an absence. — Steve Rasnic Tem

He was dead; I needed to let his memory go, too. That was the first step for me, before discrimination.
Yet my love was the ghost of a young girl's dream. It walked alone in the abyss, stubbornly, where only illusions prospered on tears and regrets. My love had a life of its own; it was perverted but nevertheless still vital. For that reason, I wanted to return to deep space. Honestly, I would have preferred it if we had traveled forever and never stopped at another star system. To fall into endless blackness, that was my new fantasy.
The young girl with the ancient dream wept. I could hear her; I even saw her tears on the glass of the observation deck. It made me feel old. I didn't want to know her name. I couldn't forget Tem but I needed to forget her. — Christopher Pike

The word of God is living and effective and sharper than any two-edged sword ... . It is a judge of the ideas and thoughts of the heart. Hebrews 4:12 — Beth Moore

After people have gone, you forget their faults, and you recall the ideal more than the person. — Ann Aguirre

And I wish I had the power to tell tem that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. — Ayn Rand

But the more I think about it, the more I think PC words are a crock of shit. If I want to describe something using a stupid word, I should. — Mark A. Rayner

Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come. — Steve Rasnic Tem

The more we want certain situations, the more we find ourself stuck in situations we do not want. — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright. — Katharine E.K. Duckett

Everything changes your life. — Melanie Tem

Tears are words that need to be written. — Bushra Satkhed