Quotes from Glen Duncan

It's no surprise to him what any government does, least of all his own.

How was the light today?" "Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky's blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone's hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.

Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses...

Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?

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 truth doesn't care what anyone wants. The truth is innocent. You can't blame the truth.

If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you'd be miserable poor.

But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.

It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.

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.

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. We

He'd seen her not really recognising him, not really, when it came down to it, caring who he was. It was disgusting, that pain could do that. What was the point of it, except to shame and disgust everyone? To make a mockery of love? If that was God then fuck God, whether there was a reason for it or not. If there was a reason then fuck the reason. No kind of reason he was interested in any more.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again: kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.

The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze.

Yo!" "We good?" "We're good." "Okay. You've broken Mr. Marlowe's window, however." "Apologies, boss. Exuberance.

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.

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—

Human love didn't eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.

Live long enough and nothing is news. 'The News' is 'the new things.' That's fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details.

She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.

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.

Fuck the miracle of life, where do I sign up for a hysterectomy?

all his strength gathered in his hips and chest and his arms wrapped around me and his breath jabbed soft and hot in my ear and a note of tenderness was there at the end like a lovely curlicue and I liked him because there was no disguising the honest male gladness that went from his body out to mine.

Hot tip: If you're a human having a fling with a werewolf, break it off. Now.