Quotes from Glen Duncan

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.

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.

But all the while and all the while and all the while the world.

Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.

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 . . .

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.

eyes: so transparently enslaved by the soul

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?

Thanks," she says - and suddenly tears well and fall. Augustus understands: not because she's suffered but because he's helping her. When you're a child people's cruelty makes you cry. When you're an adult it's their kindness.

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.

Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body's dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim's personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit's subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things.

This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn't buy it. "It's possible," I said. "Of course it's possible." "But you don't think so" "No. I'm not sure why." Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. "It's because it would be less romantic," she said.

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

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 

He was quiet, cooperative. He'd made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It's a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job.

I'd heard a Catholic nun on TV once saying that bearing suffering was the route to grace. I remembered Fluff saying: If there's a God he's addicted to faith. Because without evil there's no need for faith. I can't get excited about a God who's divinity depends on a drug habit.

It was a terrible refreshment, his plain way, the simple words, the absence of strategy. It made you realize how much of your life you spent not being like that. It made you realize what a waste not being like that was.

There's a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn't have it.

The yeehaw explanation is we're too busy chasing meat'n'pussy.

Imagination was condemned to make something of things.

She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way.

It's the inner life that fucks up relationships.