“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!”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“He had carte blanche to eat whatever he wanted. No amount of broccoli and vitamin D kills ten lung tumors and I know not how many brain tumors. Have the tiramisu.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“She is an angel, how bad could it be?”“Ask the first born of Israel when the Pharaoh pissed off Moses. Ask the salty residents of Sodom. Ask anyone who was not Noah or a fish once the Flood rolled in.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Whenever my colleagues and I encounter a boy who acts “normal”—not explosively violent, not oppositional to every word, not obsessed with killing and dying, not focused on sexual objectification—we are overjoyed with his potential. Here is one who has a stronger foundation on which to build, one who will not knock down his every success like a child with a brick castle to see if the adults will keep helping him rebuild.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“College is a blossoming new world of genital opportunity.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Snow is both our best friend and worst enemy. Best friend because it shows us in a concrete form the paths other have taken to get where they are. Worst enemy because it will tell such tales of us if we chance upon it. I find poetry in snow that cannot be resisted. In a way, it is the closest to time travel most civilians will ever manage.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Summer flings always seemed amazing in movies, though that might be because the leading man did not ever call his romantic interest “dude.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“If you try to leave me like this, I will haunt you until the end of your days. I will drop out of classes and become a hobo and will leave you little garbage sculptures telling you how much I love you. Every morning. Right at front of your door. You will never be rid of me.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Maybe it is like Pascal’s Wager, but I want to believe in the immortality of the soul because consciousness is such a fantastic gift that is feels cruel and unfair to end it so quickly.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“They wouldn’t have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“All this electromagnetic pollution in the air from the Internet and cell phones, it cuts you off from God.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“He wouldn’t be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“People who believe their god loves them unconditionally are less able to be controlled through divine terrorism.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Hades does not have a runny nose. I know this. The entire Greek pantheon no doubt knows this. For some reason, my nose is unaware of this basic fact of mythology.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Mythology was littered with people who meddled in the affairs of elves and fairies and were never again heard from.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Mythology didn’t cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“A lonely person on a college campus is never more than a few minutes and a bad decision from company.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“I mean every word of my divine chaos.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Once everyone thought you were crazy, they ignored you even when you told the truth.”
— Thomm Quackenbush