Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when the sun was out of sight.
~ Thomm Quackenbush
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.
The demons are not easily dispatched, instead attaching themselves to otherwise beautiful things, a favorite food or a love note left for you, to see how you react when they rear up.
Kissing a stranger because that is what is done presages an unhappy year not for any supernatural reason, but because you are unsatisfied enough with your lot in life to put your lips on the line for a fallacy.
I miss more loving someone so deeply that I can't imagine a forever without her kisses.
Like any man, he had no real protection from an unsolicited kiss from a pretty woman, even one he had just murdered.
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.
As he had kissed her neck, she could not repress the feeling she was a lamb making time with a wolf.
The art of chess is in knowing which is the most valuable piece in play, then having the courage to sacrifice it for the win.
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.
Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.
I look at my students and have no trouble picturing just how successful they should be, if only we could remove them from the impetuses that brought them to the facility. If we could move them away from gangs. If we could get them into a rehab that stuck. If we could take them from people who abuse their trust, safety, and bodies.
Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without.
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.
He kissed her forehead and drifted into an uneasy sleep, listening to the soft snoring of the creature on his chest, one he loved slightly more than he had come to fear.
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 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.
Modesty was hardly a priority in her mind until now. Now she had been cast from Hell and again knew shame.
Do you know what Hell is? ...No fire, no brimstone. Man in his infinite folly invented that to rob from his brothers their will. Hell is existing without Our Father. None of His love touches me.
No one should ever die alone. Rejoin the love of the goddess who made you. No longer a man, no longer a human, you must go as only your essence back to She who made you, into the womb of the Great Mother. You have again become a seed that will form into other lives in other lands.
Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away.
To a vampire, there is only selfishness.
The vampire community has enough problems. We don't need to add petty backbiting to it.
Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin.
Sunlight dusts them, Water is damp, Crosses pain them, And beheadings cause cramps—
The problem is not that Santa stops existing but that we do. The children we are no longer exist, a fact we do not help through immersing ourselves in the repeating cycle of wake, work, dinner, internet, sleep.
[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.
The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.
She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths.
She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it.
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.
There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it.
If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels,” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.
The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality.
The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.
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.
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.
Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.
Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough.
The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.
