450 Quotes by Thomm Quackenbush

We half-eat cookies and drink the milk, we leave notes, all so kids will believe in something that isn’t true. Kids try their best to scientifically determine whether Santa's real and our whole culture feeds them false evidence. We dupe them.

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.

The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.

Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when the sun was out of sight.

Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.

Mothers represent a genetic destiny for their daughters. In time, the daughters fill the style of shoes their mothers once wore and maybe find them not as constricting as they had imagined.

Ground Zero in the early 2000s was the best place in the nation to sob. Anywhere else, any time else, and people assumed you were mentally unfit. Here, among the dust that may have as likely been a photocopier as a middle manager, we could be pure. In the city, but not of the city.

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?

They wouldn’t have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.