Thomm Quackenbush

“I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.”

“She closes my door behind her and all the petty stresses of life reappear, eager to make up for lost time. I've developed a phobia of that door closing for the last time, of losing her in any way or of being lost.”

“Any relationship that developed power dynamics, where she thought she had the right to dictate someone else's behavior or have him dictate hers, was ended almost immediately. She could not stand the thought of hands on her that presumed she belonged to them.”

“My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.”

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

“Man created god upon his thoughts to externalize, to give form to his belief to give a reason for what they could do. The gods stole away the energies, let man believe he was ruled rather than that he rules.”

“She felt that “truthful” and “honest” were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn’t eaten Roselyn’s Chinese leftovers, but that wasn’t honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object.”

“A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me.”

“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.”

“There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.”

“The trouble with psychics is that they convince you that you get this future no matter what you do. It is as though you can cheat the universe out of your experiences, that you need only tweak something here or there to live happily ever after. It allows for spiritual sloth in the certainty of providence.”

“Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn't need to be.”

“To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night.”

“Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.”