Thomm Quackenbush Quotes

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

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Her lips are like pillows of warm glass. It is strange to find her resistant for even a second, since she has been the kisser and not the kissed. It wasn't like the last time, which felt fumbling and unnatural. That time wasn't off-putting, just like kissing one's sister. This kiss, my kiss, was tingling sweetness, electric apple blossoms.

~ 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 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.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.

~ 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

Time owed an alliance to the undying.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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.

~ 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

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

~ Thomm Quackenbush

When colleges, both within the Hudson Valley and throughout the country, encouraged women to do little beyond attaining their Mrs. degree in Husbandry, Annandale offered rigorous and prestigious degrees irrespective of gender.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.

~ 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 am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don’t need to be a biblical literalist to love my God.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Some points in time cannot flow. Think of those big-ticket moments, the ones you could still recite from fifth grade: your 1492 and Civil Wars, the Titanic and presidential assassinations. These are icebergs, solid and immense, forcing incalculable eddies to swirl around them.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The Word no longer belonged to Man because they believed it did not. Man saw the gods alone as Creators and forgot that there had ever been any other way.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

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…

~ Thomm Quackenbush

[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Loving her has become a part of my religion, a gentle mantra with every beating of my heart. I cannot imagine its Ragnarok without wilting.

~ 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

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

~ 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

Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things—elves and fairies—and now we don't. Now we see them, right?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Anyone who thinks traditional and modern interpretations of demons are frightening had better remember that real angels inspired awe because they were so ghastly. How we usually think of angel is all due to Renaissance painters trying to sex up the concept. Most Christians, if they saw an angel in the flesh, would go run for their guns.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Though her body fit with his like a puzzle piece, his mind was an ever-shifting riddle she felt she could study her whole life and never fully solve. She spent the most time touching him, caressing him, massaging the secrets from his shoulders and embarrassments from his lower back.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Our brains want God even as our minds debunk the divine.

~ 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

I have heard the predictable slew of insults, threats, epithets, and curses. Underneath all these, I hear their fear. They don’t want to hurt me, though I may serve as a stand-in for a man who they do want to hurt. They want to scare me because fear is the only way they have learned to feel powerful.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

You kill by consent, every time you let something… pervert the balance when you have the power to stop it.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

God has planned the world too perfectly for me to doubt that everyone is where they are supposed to be.

~ Thomm Quackenbush