Quotes From "Flies To Wanton Boys" By Thomm Quackenbush

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

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

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

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

I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them. Thomm Quackenbush

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

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

Instead 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

The 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

Angels 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

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… Thomm Quackenbush

[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability. Thomm Quackenbush

It’s about Nietzsche’s theory of universal debt. Your parents make it possible for you to believe a far better myth than Santa. They let you think that you, as a kid, don’t owe the world a thing. The world can give you, even if just for a few minutes, utter joy without requiring anything from you. It’s not about consumerism. As far as you know, no one buys you these presents. They come out of nothingness, with fantasies of elves attached. You aren’t required to be grateful to your parents or anything like that. They can give to you and nothing is required in return. When you get old enough, when you have kids, you get to enact this myth for them. It has nothing to do with any fat man in a red suit, no matter what we tell ourselves. It’s about owing nothing, and then realizing that you have to do this job of perpetuating this… this fantasy world, whether you like it or not. Thomm Quackenbush

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. Thomm Quackenbush

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. Thomm Quackenbush

His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus. Thomm Quackenbush

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. Thomm Quackenbush

You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it. Thomm Quackenbush

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

Making love, sensing how he felt about her in the high tide of passion, seeing herself through his eyes, brought her to an ecstasy beyond words. Thomm Quackenbush

Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation. Thomm Quackenbush

In an electroencephalogram… one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm.. Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn’t happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn’t come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden’s often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax–this is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one. . Thomm Quackenbush

They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than “somewhere else. Thomm Quackenbush

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

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. Thomm Quackenbush

Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles. Thomm Quackenbush

Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic. Thomm Quackenbush

[H]e had heard of, but given little credence to, magic. There was always someone talking of folk remedies and charms, but it seemed to him the inclination of fools misunderstanding chance. Thomm Quackenbush

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

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. Thomm Quackenbush

He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary. Thomm Quackenbush

She felt that “truthful” and “honest” were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn’t eaten Roselyn’s Chinese leftovers, but that wasn’t honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object. Thomm Quackenbush

My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool. Thomm Quackenbush

A college provides a means of accrediting and laundering one’s existence, so that what was may be forgotten under the weight of something far more mundane. Thomm Quackenbush

Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make. Thomm Quackenbush

She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved. Thomm Quackenbush

No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book. Thomm Quackenbush

Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She’s practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot. Thomm Quackenbush

[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess. Thomm Quackenbush

I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance. Thomm Quackenbush

The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words? Thomm Quackenbush

I don’t think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I’d want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway. Thomm Quackenbush

The art of chess is in knowing which is the most valuable piece in play, then having the courage to sacrifice it for the win. Thomm Quackenbush

Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without. Thomm Quackenbush

He fell in with the quiet revolutionaries on campus–those who felt that the disenfranchisement of half the population was ridiculous, those who did not accept that rights were predicated on skin tone–partly because he couldn’t bring himself to avoid tempting trouble. He agreed with all their points, but understood that they were freer to make them purely because they had the money to build a wall around their experiences. That was what people did, wasn’t it? Ignore the majority of experience and actively disengage from those telling them otherwise. Thomm Quackenbush

[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist. Thomm Quackenbush

The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger. Thomm Quackenbush

Even in concept, angels are unsettling. They’re like drones, totally mindlessly following the will of God. The only difference between the Heavenly angels and demons is that the demons opted to follow after a different queen bee. So, you have these eyeball speckled, part animal monsters who exist only to worship and obey God. They don’t have a moral compass, they just act. Thomm Quackenbush