“I do not imagine I will ever cling to her like she is the last handhold on an otherwise sheer cliff. I have wings. I am ever here in this moment because she is where I want to be. She is not some inanimate savior, she has wings of her own to flutter and soar. I intend to fly beside her, to tumble through the air in loops and gambols, to carry her when she grows tired, to keep her warm beneath them against raging winds.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“I’m a holiday Christian at best and I’d never given much thought to demons. They were an adult version of the boogieman hiding in every kid’s closet.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Ghosts are some of the loneliest people you will ever meet.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick without breaking out the leather bracers, wings, or Ye Broken Olde English.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“If you can’t feel the touch of the gods on your own, it greatly behooves you to work on that before some lecher tells you his touch is just as good.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Everyone you meet is an aspect of the gods and has a lesson to teach you.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to continue to have feminine bodies, so many of these tacky sluts have never heard word one about what fashion entails.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“My mother buys a handful of wishing beans, which just seem to be white, dry beans with no specific magickal import. She will parse these out over the months when she feels her family members most need a wish. She can believe in wishes, since it is the familiar magic of wells, birthdays, and first stars.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they’ve been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don’t flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“[T]hese friends were of the female persuasion, and while by and large they were bi and large, they still represented potential threats on [her] feminine radar.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her back into the cold water of life.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“She hated anyone who clung to the supernatural when the natural was perfectly serviceable.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“Is there a term for when you are only gay for the top half of someone?”“I think that makes you bisect-ual.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“I know for a fact the first UFOs reported in modern times, just before the crash at Roswell, were boomerang shaped and were reported as ‘flying saucers’ to describe the motion of their flight, like a saucer skipping over water. Yet immediately after, people saw and photographed saucer-shaped objects. Boomerang-shaped objects were rarely seen. Now people mostly report seeing large triangles instead of discs or boomerangs, because that is what they are told to expect to see.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“That these people are wandering around, looking for aliens to justify the emptiness inside them and let them feel special without effort, creeps me out.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“If it took eons to get to the edge of one’s galactic yard, she could not imagine the neighbors dropping by for a casual visit, especially since the heavenly houses were uninhabitable well into the next state.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“A goddess does not need to eat and does so only for her pleasure.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“He’s very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“We do not require man’s religion for salvation. We do not believe in anything that forces people to keep their places in this world.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“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.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“The Hermit is an important tarot card with much to tell us, but he tends not to be so welcome around the bonfire.”
— Thomm Quackenbush
“She wished she had eyes like her sister, huge and bright, constantly straddling the line between terrified child and ingénue.”
— Thomm Quackenbush