Thomm Quackenbush Quotes - Page 4

She kissed him… long enough he could almost hear her thoughts. Long enough that he began to know her story, know what she had been through.
Thomm Quackenbush
We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming.
Thomm Quackenbush
Frequently, people confront us who seemed to be egging the world into calling them on their miserable actions so they can have the pleasure of angry vengeance or an excuse to attract attention. Our compassion cannot be giving them what they think they want, since it is unreasonable to want to be hateful.
Thomm Quackenbush
As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction.
Thomm Quackenbush
The most compassionate thing I can do for them is continuing to see their potential. They need to know that people are not going to abandon them because of their bad behavior. Only in the security of this can they let themselves learn better strategies.
Thomm Quackenbush
enough people disagree with what Jesus is to prevent Him from...from manifesting, as such. And billions don't believe He existed at all. He is a legend, a myth. A Jewish carpenter people ignore while committing acts in His name, even as they call themselves believers.
Thomm Quackenbush
I think it simply comes down to fantasy being the language I speak. While I cannot get into epic sword and sorcery, I see the world as having the potential to be slightly off-kilter. I have run into people who do not quite seem human – though of course they are – and have been privy to coincidences that almost make me believe in magic. Fantasy is sometimes just asking yourself, “Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?
Thomm Quackenbush
Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other... The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists... So, I chose to believe in magic.
Thomm Quackenbush
Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided.
Thomm Quackenbush
I am not interested in wishing hard and having the Universe provide all I need without any work on my part.
Thomm Quackenbush
I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living.
Thomm Quackenbush
I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it.
Thomm Quackenbush
Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic.
Thomm Quackenbush
[H]e had heard of, but given little credence to, magic. There was always someone talking of folk remedies and charms, but it seemed to him the inclination of fools misunderstanding chance.
Thomm Quackenbush
Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn't need to be.
Thomm Quackenbush
I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.
Thomm Quackenbush
We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.
Thomm Quackenbush
We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…
Thomm Quackenbush
Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.
Thomm Quackenbush
My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.
Thomm Quackenbush
Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles.
Thomm Quackenbush
Shane never knew how to address her friends' parents. She wanted to call her Mrs. Eliot's Mom, but knew that the cutesiness would not be appreciated. “Mrs. Kaspar” sounded too like a phone solicitor, which would not do after having kissed the circumference of her son's neck.
Thomm Quackenbush
We are given these niches, small worlds of our own populated by only a handful, where we feel understood. Our bubble worlds bump into innumerable others daily, but there is so little cause to allow their integrity to be breached.
Thomm Quackenbush
The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.
Thomm Quackenbush
…He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could.
Thomm Quackenbush
Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.
Thomm Quackenbush
You and me? We are never going to be just friends. The only time I'm not adoring you is when I am too busy hating you and wishing to God I never met you...
Thomm Quackenbush
She had seen this relationship dying before it ever lived, but allowed optimism and lust to blind her.
Thomm Quackenbush
We want our delusions and will violently defend these when confronted. We want to believe that the job that is slowly choking us is good, because the effort it would take to change is too terrifying to contemplate. We never want to hear how badly we are being treated in a relationship because we are strong and how dare you suggest we don't know better.
Thomm Quackenbush
The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives.
Thomm Quackenbush
She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had.
Thomm Quackenbush
I have long seen my spirituality as personal, to the degree that I harbor a slight mistrust for anyone who practices similarly. It is as though they are admitting to have on the same cut and color of underwear I do. It may be true, but I don't like to share these details with strangers.
Thomm Quackenbush
Her rebirth stood in her mind with the clarity of a perfect diamond, the light scattering the rainbows through her body.
Thomm Quackenbush
The stars glittered through the atmosphere, and he thought of the distances that light must take to hit his eye at exactly that moment. Without him here, those photons would have been wasted.
Thomm Quackenbush
He was a fixture of the New Paltz community, an inexplicable light switch in the new apartment that definitely turns something on but you can't quite say what. You flick it whenever you get home and inexplicably feel a sort of relief, promising yourself that you'll figure out the wiring one of these days, but not today. Today, you are a bit too busy and this curious switch isn’t hurting anything by being a mystery.
Thomm Quackenbush
If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.
Thomm Quackenbush
Reciting from rote seems a terrible way to honor the gods and a precise killing of the power of the words.
Thomm Quackenbush
Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing.
Thomm Quackenbush
Man created god upon his thoughts to externalize, to give form to his belief to give a reason for what they could do. The gods stole away the energies, let man believe he was ruled rather than that he rules.
Thomm Quackenbush
Jasmine had endured enough parochial schooling before middle school to have a residual attachment to the beautiful parts of believing, the certainty of knowing one is loved by something beyond comprehension, but also a niggling fear of those who believed too much in anything they could not touch. Believers were the sort to wave pictures of dead fetuses at her when she went to her gynecologist for a checkup.
Thomm Quackenbush
They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans.
Thomm Quackenbush
I discuss my beliefs less because I bed my atheist, who cannot believe in much more sacred than our kisses.
Thomm Quackenbush
We are left at the brink of our future each day and the only real choice we have is not to jump but instead make our path through the briar.
Thomm Quackenbush
I don't know what my future will bring me and it's terrifying. To stand before this vast expanse and know that the future could take away what matters most simply because that is the nature of indifferent chaos in the hands of wanton boys.
Thomm Quackenbush
The trouble with psychics is that they convince you that you get this future no matter what you do. It is as though you can cheat the universe out of your experiences, that you need only tweak something here or there to live happily ever after. It allows for spiritual sloth in the certainty of providence.
Thomm Quackenbush
Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide.
Thomm Quackenbush
Whatever problems we encountered, we put there. If we trace the line back, every struggle derived from some decision we made. It is not chance, it is how we teach ourselves.
Thomm Quackenbush
She did not arrive at Annandale without taking the chisel to herself more than once, without rubbing up against a few boys to smooth an edge or two.
Thomm Quackenbush
I honor the divine on a daily basis, but I want to know that the greatest magick in my life is living authentically with what I have and can do.
Thomm Quackenbush
Magick need not be a crutch, but it is hard to argue that anything you lean on in lieu of building your own strength weakens resolve.
Thomm Quackenbush
Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.
Thomm Quackenbush
They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than “somewhere else.
Thomm Quackenbush
Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly—this wasn't technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life.
Thomm Quackenbush
At least the more modern princesses had the guts to do something aside from clean and wait to be rescued. They armed themselves and tried to provide good role models to impressionable girl tykes. It riled some innate feminist... that the princesses were strongest when they were acting like the men...
Thomm Quackenbush
Any relationship that developed power dynamics, where she thought she had the right to dictate someone else's behavior or have him dictate hers, was ended almost immediately. She could not stand the thought of hands on her that presumed she belonged to them.
Thomm Quackenbush
Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.
Thomm Quackenbush
It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength.
Thomm Quackenbush
Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.
Thomm Quackenbush
There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?
Thomm Quackenbush
I see no reason that a man should have any issue with worshiping a goddess any more than a woman would in worshiping a male deity. It is undeniable that women, particularly in the Abrahamic faiths, have been doing just that for thousands of years, though they do like to sneak in the divine feminine under the cloak of the Virgin Mary.
Thomm Quackenbush