Thomm Quackenbush Quotes - Page 5

Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn’t splash back on us.
Thomm Quackenbush
I have never tried to walk through a mall in the Christmas season dressed like a jolly old elf. You might as well dress up like a pork chop and walk into an alley full of starving dogs.
Thomm Quackenbush
My main nurturing instinct toward children is mild sadism--picking them up and threatening to drop them--which is why I am a good uncle but would make a poor father.
Thomm Quackenbush
There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one whom you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that last one first, you have it made.
Thomm Quackenbush
Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.
Thomm Quackenbush
You know about witches, wizards. You can envision dragons, even if you presently think you are above believing in them. You doubt magic, but you have a word for it. Isn't that a strangeness that wears at you? All these things that you know all about, but you think you are above. Did you used to be able to shape the spell children use to find lost things in the grass? Did you always know to look at the sky, at stars, when you make your wishes? Who taught you the things your soul has always known?
Thomm Quackenbush
Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.
Thomm Quackenbush
Roselyn adored the scent of sex, the wafting aroma of angel fontanels before they earn their halos.
Thomm Quackenbush
Private moments held not a candle to coitus, not even the expensive kind of candle that made the whole room smell of far off seasons.
Thomm Quackenbush
Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers.
Thomm Quackenbush
It seemed inequitable at best that one could and did gain a reputation for things that left one both physically and emotionally unsatisfied.
Thomm Quackenbush
There is little worse than when the person to whom you want to apologize is having great sex in your room.
Thomm Quackenbush
Sex was this primal connection like no magick she had ever known, even separated by a millimeter of latex. She knew that some combined the two and, while she could see how this would improve the magick, it would dilute the sex.
Thomm Quackenbush
I was pure, before you defiled me, and don't you forget it. As though the concept of purity is anything more than the construct of selfish, competitive men stampeding toward the women to call dibs. I'll be damned if I'm not worth stampeding toward, but the prize had better be me, hymen or no hymen.
Thomm Quackenbush
Aw, so he used you as a penis cozy and then left? Guys are pigs.
Thomm Quackenbush
Sex is usually cleaner than a blood sacrifice.
Thomm Quackenbush
Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex.
Thomm Quackenbush
Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred.
Thomm Quackenbush
In an electroencephalogram… one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm... Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn’t happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn’t come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden’s often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax—this is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one.
Thomm Quackenbush
They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities.
Thomm Quackenbush
Maybe the world didn’t need witches and wolves, because the world itself did more to steal away the magic than fantasy ever could. It didn’t matter if one was disobedient, foolish, or unlucky, because the worst things just happened.
Thomm Quackenbush
If I can alter my perception of the reality, I can change the reality itself.
Thomm Quackenbush
If you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist.
Thomm Quackenbush
Magic has its own weight, and that weight, the gravity of it, is pulling the fabric of reality like a bowling ball on a spandex sheet.
Thomm Quackenbush
Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.
Thomm Quackenbush
Making love, sensing how he felt about her in the high tide of passion, seeing herself through his eyes, brought her to an ecstasy beyond words.
Thomm Quackenbush
When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say "blessed be" and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous world, even and especially as I can rattle on about magma cooling, abiogenesis, and natural selection.
Thomm Quackenbush
God has planned the world too perfectly for me to doubt that everyone is where they are supposed to be.
Thomm Quackenbush
You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it.
Thomm Quackenbush
You kill by consent, every time you let something… pervert the balance when you have the power to stop it.
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
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
Our brains want God even as our minds debunk the divine.
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
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
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
Holding fantasy to our chests only means our hands are not free to work.
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
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
[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability.
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
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
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
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
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
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
I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.
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
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
Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.
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
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
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 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