Quotes by 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.

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.

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

Were 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.

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.

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.

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

She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved.

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.

No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.

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.

My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I cant help but whisper comments to them.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess.