A Creature Was Stirring Quotes

“It is a new day, new month, new year, but it isn't a new you. You are the same person dealing with the same problems that you cannot dispatch by tearing off the calendar page. Solutions come incrementally, however much the sliding into magical thinking seems permissible when grass lies under a foot of snow.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“I get that Christmas is generally schmaltzy. I understand that it is used as a cynical cash grab. I know how far it is from what Jesus would have wanted. Nevertheless, I like that people put forth some effort to see one another during this season, that some people shake out of their commonplace anthood and toward sainthood.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“The aftertaste of New Year's Eve parties wears on me for the same reason I am not much for resolutions. Dusting off a stepper because we switched out our calendar is pointless. After all, society also conditions that most will whiff their resolutions by January 3rd, at which point one is to abandon the resolutions utterly and feel guilty as one devours a box of Christmas chocolates.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels,” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Isn’t Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“One’s first love is the most transformative and least replicable experience. I could love someone else, but it would be its own unfathomable emotion. It would not be this precious, first, spring love. If I cannot love her fully, it will be a love that corrodes within me.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“I preach best from a point of penance.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Christmas was gluing cotton balls to Santa’s beard in Coke ads, sneaking candy canes off the tree daily (that my parents replaced every few nights), enough gift-wrap to wallpaper a room, the terror and delight of knowing a magical being would enter my home while I slept.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Kissing a stranger because that is what is done presages an unhappy year not for any supernatural reason, but because you are unsatisfied enough with your lot in life to put your lips on the line for a fallacy.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Naps are not a sign of physical slovenliness. They are a sign that I am listening to my body. It will reward me with stable emotions, hormones that stay in check, social finesse, continued cleverness, and the ability to write prose that does not make me gag.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“The problem is not that Santa stops existing but that we do. The children we are no longer exist, a fact we do not help through immersing ourselves in the repeating cycle of wake, work, dinner, internet, sleep.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Even if one is doing nothing more than eating Chinese food with one's Muslim and Jewish friends (don't order the pork lo mein), being together on the longest nights of the year, as the cold sets into the ground and makes it crunch, the warmth inside is infectious and transcendent.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“A woman steps out of the back door after an hour of him sitting. Younger than either of us, blonde with a tinge of gray at her temples, the light creases of age in the corners of her eyes, beautiful in the untouchable way of mothers who are our exemplars for what we will admire in women when we come of age.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Snow is both our best friend and worst enemy. Best friend because it shows us in a concrete form the paths other have taken to get where they are. Worst enemy because it will tell such tales of us if we chance upon it. I find poetry in snow that cannot be resisted. In a way, it is the closest to time travel most civilians will ever manage.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“Some 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, A Creature Was Stirring

“Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring