Tem Quotes

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

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

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

They always choose heroes - that much is clear… Wind demons. ~ Heather Fawcett

Is Tsering's familiar as bad-tempered as Ragtooth?" I said.
"No," Mara said. "Tsering is a steady sort of man. A familiar's temperament seems to reflect that of its master."
Tem seemed to smother a snort. I glared at Mara, replying in a dignified voice, "I haven't heard that to be the case. ~ Heather Fawcett

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

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

Only you could climb the highest mountain in the Empire, hunt down a fallen star, and escape the Fifth Army without a trace. - Tem, to Kamzin ~ Heather Fawcett

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

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

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

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 Knausgaard

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

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

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

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