Thomm Quackenbush

“…He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could.”

“Her beauty was enough to get her into most any situation she desired and her tongue—sharp and venomous—was enough to get her out again.”

“Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.”

“She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had.”

“Trying to destroy yourself gives a pretty clear message and it's not one I think you'd like. Sounds a bit like, “I'm too self-centered to be constructive, so I have to open a vein…”

“Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide.”

“Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times?”

“Some points in time cannot flow. Think of those big-ticket moments, the ones you could still recite from fifth grade: your 1492 and Civil Wars, the Titanic and presidential assassinations. These are icebergs, solid and immense, forcing incalculable eddies to swirl around them.”

“God has planned the world too perfectly for me to doubt that everyone is where they are supposed to be.”

“In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, out of the nothing came the Word and the Word was power. Every utterance of the Word gave form to the Void, starting with beings to utter the Word. There was no Adam, no Eve, and no need. What Man named was.”

“The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.”

“Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.”

“In the pause that followed, Shane understood why people said their hearts broke. She always thought it was a weak metaphor of strong emotion. She could feel each bit of shrapnel from her heart stab at her stomach and lungs. Her knees gave out beneath her as she heard the voice tell her what she already knew in her fragments of cardiac tissue.”

“She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.”

“Loving her has become a part of my religion, a gentle mantra with every beating of my heart. I cannot imagine its Ragnarok without wilting.”

“If you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist.”

“She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.”

“I am not interested in wishing hard and having the Universe provide all I need without any work on my part.”

“None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.”

“She could not keep his death in her head, like when she tried to imagine the infiniteness of the universe and nearly swooned at the vastness of the thought.”