Top 100 Glen Duncan Quotes
#1. 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
#2. For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading.
Glen Duncan
#3. (One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous.
Glen Duncan
#4. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.
Glen Duncan
#5. 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
#6. But what's heartbreak? A feeling. I've had it with feelings, even if they haven't had it with me.
Glen Duncan
#7. You know why they invented the phrase 'case closed'?
What?
So that the audience would know it wasn't.
Glen Duncan
#8. 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
#9. Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.
Glen Duncan
#10. Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents.
Glen Duncan
#11. The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis.
Glen Duncan
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Darkness now is pure phenomenon, nothing to do with him. This is the final relationship with the universe: you find solace only in things that offer none.
Glen Duncan
#15. The absense of a soul, by the way, makes it easy to inhabit a body. (Therefore, why is Elton John still pudging around unpossessed? I hear you ask?)
Glen Duncan
#16. Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.
Glen Duncan
#17. She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.
Glen Duncan
#18. One knows one's madness, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
Glen Duncan
#19. Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
Glen Duncan
#20. Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows ...
Glen Duncan
#21. 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
#22. When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else.
Glen Duncan
#23. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses...
Glen Duncan
#24. No amount of violence you've done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself.
Glen Duncan
#25. 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
#26. Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.
Glen Duncan
#27. 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
#28. What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.
Glen Duncan
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. There is no God. And that's His only Commandment.
Glen Duncan
#32. Hot tip: If you're a human having a fling with a werewolf, break it off. Now.
Glen Duncan
#33. But all the while and all the while and all the while the world.
Glen Duncan
#34. He was a blessing in my life. My life was full of blessings. And one curse: That no amount of blessings was ever enough.
Glen Duncan
#35. I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth.
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. Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.
Glen Duncan
#38. I don't know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don't know if the whole thing's an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.
Glen Duncan
#39. For the love of Mary, I get it, she's got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try'n get back into it.
Glen Duncan
#40. He was always teasing me about not reading books, but one day he said: Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
Glen Duncan
#41. 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
#42. You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.
Glen Duncan
#43. My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.
Glen Duncan
#44. 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
#45. Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation's a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick.
Glen Duncan
#46. It's why people in sexual extremis say Oh, God. It's not a cry to the Divine, it's a recognition of their own divinity.
Glen Duncan
#47. I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.
Glen Duncan
#48. Thus she's discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it...You do what you do because it's that or death.
Glen Duncan
#49. The Curse has a thing for contrast: frivolity one minute, homicide the next.
Glen Duncan
#50. 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
#51. Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.
Glen Duncan
#52. You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.
Glen Duncan
#53. He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.
Glen Duncan
#54. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script?
Glen Duncan
#55. There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.
Glen Duncan
#56. The modern adult, Jake had written, has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry
Glen Duncan
#57. If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you'd be miserable poor.
Glen Duncan
#58. Every present anger derives from past weakness.
Glen Duncan
#59. (I invented rock and roll. You wouldn't believe the things I've invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money ... Let's save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which ... pretty much ... is everything in the world, isn't it? Gosh.)
Glen Duncan
#60. For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over.
Glen Duncan
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and part of us rejoices.
Glen Duncan
#64. 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
#65. I've always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It's hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt like it you'd learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can't blame women.
Glen Duncan
#66. That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it.
Glen Duncan
#68. 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
#69. The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective.
Glen Duncan
#70. Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jeweled with tears.
Glen Duncan
#71. There's a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn't have it.
Glen Duncan
#72. eyes: so transparently enslaved by the soul
Glen Duncan
#74. With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.
Glen Duncan
#75. Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.
Glen Duncan
#76. 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
#77. Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
Glen Duncan
#78. Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.
Glen Duncan
#79. I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.
Glen Duncan
#80. This, of course, is the crux. It doesn't really matter what the language is, only whether there's a transcendent moral grammar underpinning it. No one really cares what hell's called or who runs it. They just don't want to go there.
Glen Duncan
#81. Comedy, of course, lives for serious moments.
Glen Duncan
#82. In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.
Glen Duncan
#83. Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.
Glen Duncan
#84. 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
#85. We're the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it's only the best thing for us if it's the worst thing for someone else.
Glen Duncan
#86. 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
#87. There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt.
Glen Duncan
#88. You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.
Glen Duncan
#89. My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.
Glen Duncan
#90. I'm still bothered.
You're French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.
Glen Duncan
#91. No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.
Glen Duncan
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.
Glen Duncan
#95. 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
#96. The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze.
Glen Duncan
#97. It's Big Brother with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon.
Glen Duncan
#99. 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
#100. All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its ... motivation. Thus vampires spend a lot of time lounging around and staring out of the window and finding they can't be arsed.
Glen Duncan
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