Glen Duncan Quotes
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.
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.
Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.
When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.
You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.
The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.
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.
The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.
No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.
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.
One knows one's madnesses, 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.
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.
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.
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.
My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God--then having it taken away, forever.
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.
If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
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.
Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.
The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.
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.
