Thomas Pierce > Quotes

“God created the world in seven days, but those days weren't necessarily twenty-four-hour days. Each one of His days might have been a million years long. Human time means nothing in the realm of Heaven, where clocks probably don't have hands, but golden arms, and the arms belong to God. On which day did the mammoth get created? It wasn't on the seventh day, since that was the day of rest. Quite possibly it came on the morning of the fifth an d went back out again the same afternoon. Thinking of creations come and gone in such a short amount of time makes Mawmaw sad.”
― Thomas Pierce, Shirley Temple Three

“Inside every group, he decides, there are more groups. Circles within circles, and inside of those, more circles still, all of them infinitely divisible. You could spend your whole life wondering which ones you're in and which ones you're not and which ones really want you and which ones are holes that have no bottom.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“You're not going to get weird on me, are you?"

"How exactly would I get weird on you?"

"I don't know, but the way you just said weird felt a little weird to me.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Scientists have discovered something called ‘mirror neurons.’ A mirror neuron is one that will fire in your brain when you perform an action and also when you watch that same action being performed by someone else. Why we have these neurons is a mystery. Maybe they’ve helped us become more empathetic. When you see or read about someone else’s bad news, maybe a part of you is experiencing it too. It occurred to me that when we watch videos of people falling down, we are waiting for the moment of impact- for a bruise, a hurt, a collision, and that expectation makes us full participants in the event. Every fall we see is our own, and all of us are falling all the time.

I wondered if the same would hold true if I reversed the fall. Would our neurons mirror that rising? Are all of us rising right now? Are you?”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Through the metal bars of the jungle gym, she watches two gray squirrels chase each other around a tree. Around and around and around. So gratuitous.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Why we dare to assume a physical form and brave a world such as ours, so full of tragedy and fear and pain, murders and rapes, war, ceaseless brutality and conflict. We wouldn’t subject ourselves to this unless it was worth it, on some level.”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives

“Everything you fear—the viruses, the violence—we’ve always been living with it, in some form. What’s changed is that today we’re just more aware. It only seems like there’s more to fear because we’ve been so successful at identifying all the various threats.”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives: A Novel

“Falling down is the universe being honest with you, finally. It’s life as it really is.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“I wasn’t at all comforted by that idea, by the possibility of multiple afterlives and a soul hungering through them for eternity.”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives

“That the Bible is the absolute word of God? (The Bible was written by men about God, not the other way around.)”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives

“These videos, he says, come from all over, from everywhere, and, in a sense, the videos belong to all of us. They are our videos, collectively ours, not a part of what’s commonly called the public domain, per se, but as a part of what could be referred to as the proto-public domain, the substrata of all recorded human experience.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Two nasty, clammy frogs squeezing each other for weeks on end in the middle of some frozen field? Romantic was not the first word that hopped into Mary’s mind, not at all, but then again she understood what her mother was getting at, she really did, two otherwise lonely creatures conjoined, clinging to each other, not giving up on each other, swimming into the dark and watery deep, down to the cold, cold bottom of things where nothing else lives. There was, if you disregarded certain details, such as the sex itself, something beautiful about it…”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“A random act of violence," his mother called it. "A totally senseless thing." Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is random and senseless place.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“I am my voice, aren’t I? I don’t know, Mr. Ash says, without turning around. Are you your anus?”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“The soul abides, I tell her. Some aspect of you does. You’re like a thought. Or an idea. An echo. An echo in search of other echoes. You do not end here, on this planet, but then again, neither does the questioning. Neither does the doubt. The search for meaning, as unbearable as it sounds, might not end with our death.”
― Thomas Pierce

“The whole is contained in every single fragment, in every piece.”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives

“Scale back enough, time-wise, and all we are is a quick parade of exploding hearts.”
― Thomas Pierce, The Afterlives