1
She was an exotic flower amongst the snowdrifts, out of place, a Technicolor misfit in a monochrome Christmas movie.Thomm Quackenbush
3
Her 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
4
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.Thomm Quackenbush
5
The 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
6
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.Thomm Quackenbush
7
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.Thomm Quackenbush
8
Time owed an alliance to the undying.Thomm Quackenbush
9
If 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
10
She 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
11
I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.Thomm Quackenbush
12
When 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
13
Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.Thomm Quackenbush
14
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.Thomm Quackenbush
15
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.Thomm Quackenbush
16
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.Thomm Quackenbush
17
I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.Thomm Quackenbush
18
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.Thomm Quackenbush
19
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?Thomm Quackenbush
20
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.Thomm Quackenbush