Quotes from Glen Duncan

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.

Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. 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.

I rather wished I'd stabbed him somewhere less awkward.

You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.

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.

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.

The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's paved with intriguing questions.

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.

Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and part of us rejoices.

The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations.

It's just what you're stuck with, the lousy furniture you can't change. The educated me knows hell's nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I'm going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way." "It's the postmodern solution," I said. "Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.

The beast is redundant. It's been us all along.

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.

It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.

It's a ridiculous story, of course, but history's full of ridiculous stories. 'You can't make this shit up,' one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don't ask me. I just work here.

The Mortals are free, Lucifer. What they've done they've done from within themselves. - Raphael

Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly

Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.

The collective human unconscious can't stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn't accident, it's deep species strategy.

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.

You know why they invented the phrase 'case closed'? What? So that the audience would know it wasn't.

Full moon rises. You change. You need what you need, so you do what you do. The kill – like the show – must go on.

She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.