Thomm Quackenbush

“The most compassionate thing I can do for them is continuing to see their potential. They need to know that people are not going to abandon them because of their bad behavior. Only in the security of this can they let themselves learn better strategies.”

“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.”

“You can’t exist on this plane for long purely one thing or another. A totally evil creature is so destructive that it obliterates itself. A totally good one… the same. So, we mix a bit of coffee with our cream.”

“Were genuine aliens to find us… the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens.”

“Anyone who thinks traditional and modern interpretations of demons are frightening had better remember that real angels inspired awe because they were so ghastly. How we usually think of angel is all due to Renaissance painters trying to sex up the concept. Most Christians, if they saw an angel in the flesh, would go run for their guns.”

“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.”

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

“Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing.”

“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.”

“As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction.”

“I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.”

“Though her body fit with his like a puzzle piece, his mind was an ever-shifting riddle she felt she could study her whole life and never fully solve. She spent the most time touching him, caressing him, massaging the secrets from his shoulders and embarrassments from his lower back.”

“Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one’s life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. “It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you.”Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. “I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration.”

“You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.”

“The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives.”

“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.”

“I think it simply comes down to fantasy being the language I speak. While I cannot get into epic sword and sorcery, I see the world as having the potential to be slightly off-kilter. I have run into people who do not quite seem human – though of course they are – and have been privy to coincidences that almost make me believe in magic. Fantasy is sometimes just asking yourself, “Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?”

“Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred.”

“Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.”

“Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex.”