Thomm Quackenbush Quotes

It is a new day, new month, new year, but it isn't a new you. You are the same person dealing with the same problems that you cannot dispatch by tearing off the calendar page. Solutions come incrementally, however much the sliding into magical thinking seems permissible when grass lies under a foot of snow.

Naps are not a sign of physical slovenliness. They are a sign that I am listening to my body. It will reward me with stable emotions, hormones that stay in check, social finesse, continued cleverness, and the ability to write prose that does not make me gag.

For most, ghost hunting was a few steps escalated from telling scary stories around a campfire.

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.

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

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.

Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.

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

His kisses were so hungry and male, which isn't bad. Every kiss said he could never have enough, but he wasn't going to stop trying. They were so hormonal. I wanted his sugar roughness. Girl's kisses are deliberate and polished. When she kisses me - when I kiss her - she doesn't want me. She has me and knows it.

She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.

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.

If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.

Any divinity that can't see me as a good witch in street clothes has no business hanging up a shingle as a god.

Maybe it is like Pascal's Wager, but I want to believe in the immortality of the soul because consciousness is such a fantastic gift that is feels cruel and unfair to end it so quickly.

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.

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.

Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick without breaking out the leather bracers, wings, or Ye Broken Olde English.

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 ...

The aftertaste of New Year's Eve parties wears on me for the same reason I am not much for resolutions. Dusting off a stepper because we switched out our calendar is pointless. After all, society also conditions that most will whiff their resolutions by January 3rd, at which point one is to abandon the resolutions utterly and feel guilty as one devours a box of Christmas chocolates.

He relented to the kiss and gave of himself what she required, his lips parting in symmetry with hers until the moment of realization collapsed.

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.

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

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.

Which God is the forgiving one, exactly? Old Testament, where He got His rocks off by smiting? Or New Testament, once Our Heavenly Father got Prozac?

Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn't want to change me ... Love appears to have made you less functional.

Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly - this wasn't technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life.

Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.

Angels are just beyond us. They're creatures that biology doesn't apply to. They don't love humanity at all. They just love God.

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

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.

My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a stubborn character.

Participate in your life, don't just bear witness to the rain washing you away.

Death doesn't give you control over anything. Death ends your control.

Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.

Humanity expects there to be vast conspiracies, even if they will not admit it in polite company. It is understood shadowy conspirators must thereby be somewhere.

Instead of the birds of the sky and beast of the field, the gods were more than men because Man needed them to be, for what could the world be if Man were the best of all creatures?

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

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

There is no real time, only one moment immediately after creation where God asked humanity to join Him. What humanity perceives as time, all of history, is the hesitation in saying Yes.

I don't work in places with papier-mâché and cellophane hearts.

It was inelegant, but what was not when taking a hostage?

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.

You will find that we simply provided the noose. You built the gallows, mounted the steps, put your neck in the rope, and jumped.

It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.

Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.

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

If you think it is spiritual to burn food in front of starving people in hopes that your gods will bring this back to you in triplicate, you are missing the point and sowing animosity from all sides.

I know for a fact the first UFOs reported in modern times, just before the crash at Roswell, were boomerang shaped and were reported as 'flying saucers' to describe the motion of their flight, like a saucer skipping over water. Yet immediately after, people saw and photographed saucer-shaped objects. Boomerang-shaped objects were rarely seen. Now people mostly report seeing large triangles instead of discs or boomerangs, because that is what they are told to expect to see.

There weren't always happy endings and children would do well to know that vile things could happen to them, that witches and wolves were desperate to steal them should they be disobedient or foolish or simply unlucky.

He fell in with the quiet revolutionaries on campus - those who felt that the disenfranchisement of half the population was ridiculous, those who did not accept that rights were predicated on skin tone - partly because he couldn't bring himself to avoid tempting trouble. He agreed with all their points, but understood that they were freer to make them purely because they had the money to build a wall around their experiences. That was what people did, wasn't it? Ignore the majority of experience and actively disengage from those telling them otherwise.

She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls.

Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer's phone number.

I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living.

We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming.

I was pure, before you defiled me, and don't you forget it. As though the concept of purity is anything more than the construct of selfish, competitive men stampeding toward the women to call dibs. I'll be damned if I'm not worth stampeding toward, but the prize had better be me, hymen or no hymen.

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.

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.

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.

Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.

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.

Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.

I missed you, she cried into him. Standing on top of the snow gave him an additional few inches on her and she rested her head against his chest. She could hear nothing within, just her own heartbeat echoing.

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

I cannot let my blood pressure rise because someone wishes to spread his or her bad day around, as if to dilute instead of multiply it.

It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste.

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

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.

Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.

Everyone you meet is an aspect of the gods and has a lesson to teach you.

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.

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

I feel as though I have leapt off this massive cliff and I am still building my wings ... Everyone just assumes I know how to fly, but I am pretty sure I am only falling gracefully and hoping to miss the ground.

Keep to the 'I-statements' and discuss your feelings, she lectured herself. I think, I feel. Don't be accusatory. Don't tell him that he is an insecure prick who should back off before you deck him. Instead, say, 'I feel you are acting like an insecure prick who should back off before I deck you.

Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.

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.

Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.

They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans.

The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.

Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.

The stars were so simple when she was a kid, a smattering of glowing dust circling the Earth. She did not then know that each was a sun, most considerably more massive than the daylight one she knew.

Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough.

Romantic comedies very rarely deal with washing your lover's dishes because she has to be up early for work, since no one wants to see the mundane truth when they can flip the channel to a desperate, emotionally-limited frottage.

One's first love is the most transformative and least replicable experience. I could love someone else, but it would be its own unfathomable emotion. It would not be this precious, first, spring love. If I cannot love her fully, it will be a love that corrodes within me.

Holding fantasy to our chests only means our hands are not free to work.

He had not even done the fledgling courtesy of shredding open a major artery, anointing himself in the viscous gore, and desecrating her body. The order was as flexible as her corpse remained.

I discuss my beliefs less because I bed my atheist, who cannot believe in much more sacred than our kisses.

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.

It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to continue to have feminine bodies, so many of these tacky sluts have never heard word one about what fashion entails.

[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.

You get a few of them together and don't be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in ...

He's very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk.

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.

Most people who win the lottery are exactly as they were prior within a few years if they are not worse off. The fiscal management skills that lead one to give over daily money for scratch-offs will also cause the new money to vanish.

I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.

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.

I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it.

It's not like I'm the first siren to ever make it big… Play 'Bohemian Rhapsody' on a road trip some time and tell me everyone in the car doesn't stop what they are doing to sing.