Quotes from Glen Duncan

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...

Nothing apparently, disturbed the mans air of having his mind on something more important than you. You wanted to slap him.

Not smart. Happily stupid. Stupidly happy.

but it was humanly good to be touched too, to be alone with someone at the secret feast that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. You looked at each other and felt just how old the contract was, the warm-faced commitment to the adventure, the stepping together out of the light into the rewarding darkness.

She revisited sex now as a ruined project she couldn't entirely give up on.

He was a blessing in my life. My life was full of blessings. And one curse: That no amount of blessings was ever enough.

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing.

You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it.

He didn't protest much. Evidently he had a penchant for surrender.

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.

He'd sensed the strength she'd called on to haul her sexuality out from under the weight of infertility. In his experience childlessness in women either warped into a dedication to self-hating sexual expertise or formed a subsonic noise of sadness and loss.

That's the problem with being alive," she says, staring at the floor. "You've got to keep thinking of what to do.

He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.

It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

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.

When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one. Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on 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.

The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don't you'll have what you need. Just promise me you'll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.

Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for.

It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina!