Thomm Quackenbush Quotes - Page 2

The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney - not that we had one - suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet in his holly, jolly keister.
Thomm Quackenbush
Christmas was gluing cotton balls to Santa’s beard in Coke ads, sneaking candy canes off the tree daily (that my parents replaced every few nights), enough gift-wrap to wallpaper a room, the terror and delight of knowing a magical being would enter my home while I slept.
Thomm Quackenbush
Even if one is doing nothing more than eating Chinese food with one's Muslim and Jewish friends (don't order the pork lo mein), being together on the longest nights of the year, as the cold sets into the ground and makes it crunch, the warmth inside is infectious and transcendent.
Thomm Quackenbush
I get that Christmas is generally schmaltzy. I understand that it is used as a cynical cash grab. I know how far it is from what Jesus would have wanted. Nevertheless, I like that people put forth some effort to see one another during this season, that some people shake out of their commonplace anthood and toward sainthood.
Thomm Quackenbush
Santa is like a queen bee. All the elves are his drones, who exist to feed him royal jelly, which I guess would be milk and cookies. If an elf escapes and eats royal cookies, it will turn into another Santa. That’s what all those mall Santas are. They’re trying to start their own festive colonies.
Thomm Quackenbush
Like the discovery of most things - love and religion especially - she maintained the child's arrogant wonder than no one had understood it before her and, even if they had, they could not embrace it as passionately as she.
Thomm Quackenbush
Even in concept, angels are unsettling. They’re like drones, totally mindlessly following the will of God. The only difference between the Heavenly angels and demons is that the demons opted to follow after a different queen bee. So, you have these eyeball speckled, part animal monsters who exist only to worship and obey God. They don’t have a moral compass, they just act.
Thomm Quackenbush
The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.
Thomm Quackenbush
Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough.
Thomm Quackenbush
Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.
Thomm Quackenbush
The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality.
Thomm Quackenbush
If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels,” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.
Thomm Quackenbush
There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
[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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
The vampire community has enough problems. We don't need to add petty backbiting to it.
Thomm Quackenbush
Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin.
Thomm Quackenbush
To a vampire, there is only selfishness.
Thomm Quackenbush
Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Modesty was hardly a priority in her mind until now. Now she had been cast from Hell and again knew shame.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
As he had kissed her neck, she could not repress the feeling she was a lamb making time with a wolf.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Like any man, he had no real protection from an unsolicited kiss from a pretty woman, even one he had just murdered.
Thomm Quackenbush
I miss more loving someone so deeply that I can't imagine a forever without her kisses.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
He seemed like the sort to have a vast arsenal of smirks, shaped over a decade of nonverbal conversation.
Thomm Quackenbush
If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one under your Yule tree.
Thomm Quackenbush
Isn’t Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards.
Thomm Quackenbush
They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead.
Thomm Quackenbush
Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.
Thomm Quackenbush
American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.
Thomm Quackenbush
Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.
Thomm Quackenbush
She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.
Thomm Quackenbush
I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town.
Thomm Quackenbush
I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.
Thomm Quackenbush