01UndatedShe was an exotic flower amongst the snowdrifts, out of place, a Technicolor misfit in a monochrome Christmas movie.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
02UndatedHis kisses were so hungry and male, which isn't bad. Every kiss said he could never have enough, but he wasn't going to stop trying. They were so hormonal. I wanted his sugar roughness. Girl's kisses are deliberate and polished. When she kisses me - when I kiss her - she doesn't want me. She has me and knows it.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
03UndatedHer lips are like pillows of warm glass. It is strange to find her resistant for even a second, since she has been the kisser and not the kissed. It wasn't like the last time, which felt fumbling and unnatural. That time wasn't off-putting, just like kissing one's sister. This kiss, my kiss, was tingling sweetness, electric apple blossoms.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
04UndatedAshlei 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
05UndatedThe body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
06UndatedTombstones 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
07UndatedShe 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
09UndatedIf superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
10UndatedShe is the sort of person who can do things she doesn’t know yet. There are things you know you know and you know you don’t know and you don’t know you know and you don’t know you don’t know. She may not know what she does know.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
11UndatedI know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
12UndatedWhen colleges, both within the Hudson Valley and throughout the country, encouraged women to do little beyond attaining their Mrs. degree in Husbandry, Annandale offered rigorous and prestigious degrees irrespective of gender.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
13UndatedNature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
14UndatedShane 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
15UndatedI 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
16UndatedThere 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
17UndatedI could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
18UndatedOther 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
19UndatedLike 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?Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
20UndatedShe 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
21UndatedSome 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.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
22UndatedInstead of the birds of the sky and beast of the field, the gods were more than men because Man needed them to be, for what could the world be if Man were the best of all creatures?Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
23UndatedThe Word no longer belonged to Man because they believed it did not. Man saw the gods alone as Creators and forgot that there had ever been any other way.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
24UndatedAngels are just beyond us. They’re creatures that biology doesn’t apply to. They don’t love humanity at all. They just love God.Thomm Quackenbush / quote ↗
