The Road to Vent Haven Quotes

“I wasn't the most handsome man, but it was like my dad told me once: if you got born deficient downstairs, you'd better get good using your tongue. It took me years before I got the nuance of that—not that anything was lacking.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“A ventriloquist wants to be someone else. Ventriloquists wish to speak but want to blame someone else for the consequences of their words.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“When everything else in the world is an inexplicable disaster, someone behaving normally becomes suspect.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Ventriloquism is not a physically demanding hobby. High school athletes tended to spend their weekends fingering something other than a dummy's eyes”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“You want to play innocent? That the kind of person who spends their lives projecting their voice into a lamb or lizard isn't into some kinky shit when the lights go out?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“You talk this game about what the ancient Greeks did, ghosts in the gullet, and all that. Hucksterism, sure. I can appreciate a good scam. But to the people who came to see it—to see us—it was holy.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Taking a woman home is challenging when you can see your toilet and refrigerator from your bed.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Everything else was so kosher that this might have been Passover with my folks.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Wholesomeness might as well have been a poisoned apple, a Halloween Snickers bar with a razor in its nougat center. I couldn't trust so many people absent from the warm blanket of irony. It was more comfortable to believe this was insidious.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“It felt as though I were going to take a crowbar to a church door on Christmas Eve or stood outside a grove where demon worshipers were about to sacrifice a virgin.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“You know, Aerosmith will be the thing that kills off your music. Not them directly, mind you. What they represent. Bands are going to sell out. Whatever you think is rebellious now will be used to sell you laxatives in a decade. You'll all get old and conservative. Your Saint Cobain put it well: 'Teenage angst has paid off well. Now I'm bored and old.' It's all about money. You'll get that. You think you are edgy now, but I've seen people like you start to lose their hair and then lose their minds.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“The sugar, caffeine, stars outside—and Winona's across from me, our knees touching under the table—loosened my tongue better than liquor would.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Some of them get it in their heads that they are closer to God... It could get you burned at the stake centuries ago. Throwing your voice is close enough to consorting with demons, though your voice stays where it is. All that’s different is your lips don’t move.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Ventriloquism was once sacred. Priests spoke from their stomachs, believing they were communing with the unliving, who set up shop there.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“If I didn't have anywhere more pressing to be, I would have offered her my number and the use of my backseat. Chances were good that she would have accepted at least one.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“What the hell is it with you kids and suicide? You think you've got it bad? What the hell have you had happened in your whole damn life that would be worth stretching your neck out?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“Finally, I found alternative, music that didn't seem to have a concrete definition yet. The genre was characterized by not being anything else.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“It was a rare dummy that invested itself too much in caring for humans, deaf to their input and condescending to them as a rule.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven

“I've found the sensible thing to do in circumstances like these is not to be in a room with a freshly killed body.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Road to Vent Haven