Thomm Quackenbush Quotes

You're like this...this goddess pretending to be human... And I don't know which one I love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest.

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.

He regarded Huginn as only slightly more dangerous than most pets, in that he understood why people had pets but harbored the paranoia they would one day eat their owners. True, it kept Eliot from even having a pet larger than his fist, but it also kept him from being kibble.

Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question.

Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.

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.

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.

She wished she had eyes like her sister, huge and bright, constantly straddling the line between terrified child and ingénue.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.

All this electromagnetic pollution in the air from the Internet and cell phones, it cuts you off from God.

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.

He seemed like the sort to have a vast arsenal of smirks, shaped over a decade of nonverbal conversation.

I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.

He's very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk.

My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.

I feel as though I have leapt off this massive cliff and I am still building my wings… Everyone just assumes I know how to fly, but I am pretty sure I am only falling gracefully and hoping to miss the ground.

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?

Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability.

Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make.

There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it.

The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.

Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.

I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living.

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.

She was an exotic flower amongst the snowdrifts, out of place, a Technicolor misfit in a monochrome Christmas movie.

Aw, so he used you as a penis cozy and then left? Guys are pigs.

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.

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.

It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste.

Her mother admonished through closed lips, the sound a mother can make mean anything from "pick up your socks" to "we are very disappointed you have murdered those orphans.

None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.

Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.

The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality.

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.

There weren't always happy endings and children would do well to know that vile things could happen to them, that witches and wolves were desperate to steal them should they be disobedient or foolish or simply unlucky.

I discuss my beliefs less because I bed my atheist, who cannot believe in much more sacred than our kisses.

If I am a pawn in someone else's chess game, you better believe I am going to demand an explanation before being shoved at some rook. I'll play my part, damn it, but I want the courtesy of being asked for my consent!

People who believe their god loves them unconditionally are less able to be controlled through divine terrorism.

Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer’s phone number.

I mean every word of my divine chaos.