Thomm Quackenbush

“Whatever problems we encountered, we put there. If we trace the line back, every struggle derived from some decision we made. It is not chance, it is how we teach ourselves.”

“There is little worse than when the person to whom you want to apologize is having great sex in your room.”

“I don't know what my future will bring me and it's terrifying. To stand before this vast expanse and know that the future could take away what matters most simply because that is the nature of indifferent chaos in the hands of wanton boys.”

“Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.”

“She had seen this relationship dying before it ever lived, but allowed optimism and lust to blind her.”

“I cannot let my blood pressure rise because someone wishes to spread his or her bad day around, as if to dilute instead of multiply it.”

“She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.”

“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.”

“Ashlei was free to spout off how much she loved her savior because Jesus was not about to rear back and tell her He did not quite feel the same way, that He had died for the sins of the world just because it was fun and did not want things to be too serious. He was only thirty-three, after all, and might want to martyr himself for other people.”

“As a man, I was a failure. A pathetic teacher lusting after Catholic school girls in short skirts. As a monster, I'm superb. It's comforting to know my place in the world.”

“I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don’t need to be a biblical literalist to love my God.”

“You get a few of them together and don’t be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in…”

“The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself.”

“Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear.”

“If psychics are real, it implies that the universe is far vaster and stranger than conventional perception would state. If psychics can talk to the dead, that removes the sting of mortality and loss. It also suggests there is predestination, a way to cheat the vagaries of Fate with foreknowledge. The cost for believing in them is tiny indeed compared to that.”

“Aw, so he used you as a penis cozy and then left? Guys are pigs.”

“Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.”

“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.”

“Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds.”

“They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won't manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals.”