Thomm Quackenbush quotes:

Which God is the forgiving one, exactly? Old Testament, where He got His rocks off by smiting? Or New Testament, once Our Heavenly Father got Prozac?

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.

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.

Mythology was littered with people who meddled in the affairs of elves and fairies and were never again heard from.

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

The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holding fantasy to our chests only means our hands are not free to work.

Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.

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.

Roselyn lost her taste for bacon momentarily, which was as long as she was ever capable of losing it.

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.

Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.

We're all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don't die.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Salem has become thisMecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, no one practiced anything like witchcraft near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment and land acquisition.

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.

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

Natural law has decreed it so. Isn't death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn.

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.

She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls.

Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire?

Any divinity that can't see me as a good witch in street clothes has no business hanging up a shingle as a god.

There is no real time, only one moment immediately after creation where God asked humanity to join Him. What humanity perceives as time, all of history, is the hesitation in saying "Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you want me because you love me or because I provide you normality drag?

I am not interested in wishing hard and having the Universe provide all I need without any work on my part.

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.

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.

She had picked up life where she had left off... and hoped that would be enough to get the universe to politely overlook her.

She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.

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.

Once everyone thought you were crazy, they ignored you even when you told the truth.

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

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

We can mourn and grieve and will face innumerable sunsets without him. But we will still face the sunsets.

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

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!

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.

Despite what novels implied, vampirism did not make stalking sexy.

If you knew the mercy I am showing by not dismembering you where you stand for getting in my way, you would not stop thanking me.

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.

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.

They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities.

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.

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.

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.

You look like something the cat coughed up, dragged through dirt, ate, and coughed up again.

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.

The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.

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.

Participate in your life, don't just bear witness to the rain washing you away.

The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.

Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide.

Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire~?

She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again.

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