Top 100 Glen Duncan Quotes
#1. eyes: so transparently enslaved by the soul
Glen Duncan
#2. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life.
Glen Duncan
#3. All the metaphors in this world wouldn't scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that's just darkness. Don't get me started on light. Really, don't get me started on light.
Glen Duncan
#4. I find the ideas of Catholicism incredibly rich and inspiring. Bogus, unfortunately, but nonetheless inspiring. I think they always provide an interesting nexus through which to look at the way we are.
Glen Duncan
#5. He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.
Glen Duncan
#6. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate their efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn't go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who'd taken their lives and devoured them, into you.
Glen Duncan
#7. If I'm going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
Glen Duncan
#8. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.
Glen Duncan
#9. I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.
Glen Duncan
#10. There are things you think you won't be able to do, that need the actual to become possible. There are things that only become thinkable once you're already doing them.
Glen Duncan
#11. The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity.
Glen Duncan
#12. You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.
Glen Duncan
#13. The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.
Glen Duncan
#14. When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.
Glen Duncan
#15. I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.
Glen Duncan
#16. Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.
Glen Duncan
#17. He loved the feel and smell of her palm and because he was one of those men who was always ultimately looking to dissolve himself into a woman.
Glen Duncan
#18. No amount of violence you've done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself.
Glen Duncan
#19. When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else.
Glen Duncan
#20. One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.
Glen Duncan
#21. Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows ...
Glen Duncan
#22. She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.
Glen Duncan
#23. Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.
Glen Duncan
#24. This would be my torture: all that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.
Glen Duncan
#25. I said. "But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy." No exaggeration. Harley's [book] collection's worth a million-six ...
Glen Duncan
#26. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do ...
[Lucifer]
Glen Duncan
#27. Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.
Glen Duncan
#28. Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually ...
Glen Duncan
#29. You know why they invented the phrase 'case closed'?
What?
So that the audience would know it wasn't.
Glen Duncan
#30. For almost a decade I was haunted by the memory of Deborah Black, I was about to claim. But the memory didn't haunt me; I haunted the memory. Went to it, at night or in the deadened hours of empty afternoons, woke it up, reminded it of all the fun we'd had, made it do things with me.
Glen Duncan
#31. In the face of every reason for breaking don't break because if nothing, absolutely nothing else I'm here with my hand on you. You're not alone.
Glen Duncan
#32. I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.
Glen Duncan
#33. You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts.
Glen Duncan
#34. My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.
Glen Duncan
#35. The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
Glen Duncan
#36. I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.
Glen Duncan
#37. I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth.
Glen Duncan
#38. There is no God. And that's His only Commandment.
Glen Duncan
#39. I wish you had fucked her. Then you'd know. Then you'd know the sublime ... Her asshole, for example. It's like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler -
Glen Duncan
#40. The Russian drove. New York turned in his seat to make sure I wasn't peeking. He should have been a surfer. His face was full of masculine prettiness and immensely likeable. Which, by horror's law of inverted aesthetics, made me sure we were being taken to our deaths.
Glen Duncan
#41. I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don't believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it.
Glen Duncan
#42. The truth doesn't care what anyone wants. The truth is innocent. You can't blame the truth.
Glen Duncan
#43. Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
Glen Duncan
#44. Nothing apparently, disturbed the mans air of having his mind on something more important than you. You wanted to slap him.
Glen Duncan
#45. I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.
Glen Duncan
#46. You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.
Glen Duncan
#47. You have a good cry, lovey, you'll feel better afterwards. You did feel better afterwards, but as if you'd conned yourself, fobbed yourself off.
Glen Duncan
#48. Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing.
Glen Duncan
#49. I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish.
Glen Duncan
#50. Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
Glen Duncan
#51. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.
Glen Duncan
#52. It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina!
Glen Duncan
#53. It's no surprise to him what any government does, least of all his own.
Glen Duncan
#55. We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.
Glen Duncan
#56. One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
Glen Duncan
#57. I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.'
Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.
Glen Duncan
#58. There were so many things I liked. That was the awful thing about being alive: there were so many things one liked. The awful thing about life was that there were so many thingsm full stop.
Glen Duncan
#59. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It's a survival necessity. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam. We
Glen Duncan
#60. We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.
Glen Duncan
#61. Imagination was condemned to make something of things.
Glen Duncan
#62. Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.
Glen Duncan
#63. You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.
Glen Duncan
#64. Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?
Glen Duncan
#65. A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her.
Glen Duncan
#66. I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are.
Glen Duncan
#67. She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.
Glen Duncan
#68. I haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers.
Glen Duncan
#69. Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.
Glen Duncan
#70. Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.
Glen Duncan
#71. The moment you think is unbearable forces you to disappoint yourself by bearing it. There's resigned laughter available, for the hilarity of your own durability.
Glen Duncan
#72. Fuck the miracle of life, where do I sign up for a hysterectomy?
Glen Duncan
#73. You love life because life's all there is.
Glen Duncan
#74. We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
Glen Duncan
#75. That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.
Glen Duncan
#76. Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.
Glen Duncan
#77. But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.
Glen Duncan
#78. Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.
Glen Duncan
#79. Don't kill me - you fucking cunt.
Hot tip. If you're trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt.
Glen Duncan
#80. Yo!"
"We good?"
"We're good."
"Okay. You've broken Mr. Marlowe's window, however."
"Apologies, boss. Exuberance.
Glen Duncan
#81. When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.
Glen Duncan
#82. Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous.
Glen Duncan
#83. Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.
Glen Duncan
#84. Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.
Glen Duncan
#85. Life, the dramatist of speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
Glen Duncan
#86. One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves - with their canine makeup - is that they would be dogs, as it were.
Glen Duncan
#87. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's paved with intriguing questions.
Glen Duncan
#88. The Mortals are free, Lucifer. What they've done they've done from within themselves. - Raphael
Glen Duncan
#90. What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.
Glen Duncan
#92. Everyone is obsessed with air fresheners. We associate smell with disgust. But we're all locked into the body; we can't escape it.
Glen Duncan
#93. I rather wished I'd stabbed him somewhere less awkward.
Glen Duncan
#94. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do.
Glen Duncan
#95. We stayed like that, him watching me crying, for as long as we could stand it. Then he took a couple of paces away. The room needed a window for him to go to and look out of. I could feel the grammar of the moment demanding it.
Glen Duncan
#96. I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language.
Glen Duncan
#97. Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
Glen Duncan
#98. It's the inner life that fucks up relationships.
Glen Duncan
#99. Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.
Glen Duncan
#100. Do you know how few men there are worth having?
Glen Duncan
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