Thomm Quackenbush Quotes - Page 3

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.
Thomm Quackenbush
To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.
Thomm Quackenbush
I don’t think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I’d want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway.
Thomm Quackenbush
The nature of God's plan can be difficult to fathom when you are toiling in some small corner of it, but it is glorious from above, if you allow yourself the perspective.
Thomm Quackenbush
The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?
Thomm Quackenbush
Were genuine aliens to find us… the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens.
Thomm Quackenbush
[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess.
Thomm Quackenbush
I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
The UFOs were explicable enough, just experimental aircrafts from the airport. Of course the government was not going to tell people what was actually going on. She would not be surprised if the government encouraged the UFO cultists to flock there as the perfect cover, since no one would ever believe them.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
In the pause that followed, Shane understood why people said their hearts broke. She always thought it was a weak metaphor of strong emotion. She could feel each bit of shrapnel from her heart stab at her stomach and lungs. Her knees gave out beneath her as she heard the voice tell her what she already knew in her fragments of cardiac tissue.
Thomm Quackenbush
She could not keep his death in her head, like when she tried to imagine the infiniteness of the universe and nearly swooned at the vastness of the thought.
Thomm Quackenbush
She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.
Thomm Quackenbush
She had picked up life where she had left off... and hoped that would be enough to get the universe to politely overlook her.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.
Thomm Quackenbush
Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She’s practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot.
Thomm Quackenbush
Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit.
Thomm Quackenbush
She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved.
Thomm Quackenbush
Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question.
Thomm Quackenbush
Now, it’s been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That’s the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not.
Thomm Quackenbush
We're not mad," he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority.
Thomm Quackenbush
They had perfected their team nagging to a level where they no longer had to confer and felt they would be wasting their talents if they only admonished their own children.
Thomm Quackenbush
Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make.
Thomm Quackenbush
A college provides a means of accrediting and laundering one’s existence, so that what was may be forgotten under the weight of something far more mundane.
Thomm Quackenbush
She felt that “truthful” and “honest” were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn’t eaten Roselyn’s Chinese leftovers, but that wasn’t honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object.
Thomm Quackenbush
My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.
Thomm Quackenbush
Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear.
Thomm Quackenbush
You're like this...this goddess pretending to be human... And I don't know which one I love.
Thomm Quackenbush
When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.
Thomm Quackenbush
We need the life… We need to know what we take left someone weaker or dead. It reminds us what we were. The Hunger when you start out, it isn't in the stomach or brain. You want to kill because you hate that others get to live.
Thomm Quackenbush
I tried turning my back on all this, but it is inside me. Like when I was little and you read me that story of the girl who hated footprints and shadows, so she tried to run away from both. But her shadow was always there, and she only made more footprints by running.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
Anger is a powerful, transformative emotion, one that can light the fire under us that propels us ever higher. However, the woman wasting time at the grocery story, the man cutting us off, the website that will not load are not the right targets for our energy.
Thomm Quackenbush
A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me.
Thomm Quackenbush
You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.
Thomm Quackenbush
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
Thomm Quackenbush
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.
Thomm Quackenbush
You have to surrender yourself to the experience.
Thomm Quackenbush
He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary.
Thomm Quackenbush
Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds.
Thomm Quackenbush
Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.
Thomm Quackenbush
You can’t exist on this plane for long purely one thing or another. A totally evil creature is so destructive that it obliterates itself. A totally good one… the same. So, we mix a bit of coffee with our cream.
Thomm Quackenbush
If psychics are real, it implies that the universe is far vaster and stranger than conventional perception would state. If psychics can talk to the dead, that removes the sting of mortality and loss. It also suggests there is predestination, a way to cheat the vagaries of Fate with foreknowledge. The cost for believing in them is tiny indeed compared to that.
Thomm Quackenbush
She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls.
Thomm Quackenbush
I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people.
Thomm Quackenbush
Do you want me because you love me or because I provide you normality drag?
Thomm Quackenbush
Her beauty was enough to get her into most any situation she desired and her tongue—sharp and venomous—was enough to get her out again.
Thomm Quackenbush
As a man, I was a failure. A pathetic teacher lusting after Catholic school girls in short skirts. As a monster, I'm superb. It's comforting to know my place in the world.
Thomm Quackenbush
She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually.
Thomm Quackenbush
Trying to destroy yourself gives a pretty clear message and it's not one I think you'd like. Sounds a bit like, “I'm too self-centered to be constructive, so I have to open a vein…
Thomm Quackenbush
We're all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don't die.
Thomm Quackenbush
Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire?
Thomm Quackenbush
Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.
Thomm Quackenbush
None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.
Thomm Quackenbush
They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won't manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals.
Thomm Quackenbush
To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night.
Thomm Quackenbush
I hate those people who say you always find the one when you stop looking for her. It is the advice you least want to hear when what you think you need most is someone to love. At best, it comes off like being asked to not think of a white elephant. The elephant becomes the only thing you can think of.
Thomm Quackenbush
She closes my door behind her and all the petty stresses of life reappear, eager to make up for lost time. I've developed a phobia of that door closing for the last time, of losing her in any way or of being lost.
Thomm Quackenbush