Glen Duncan > Quotes

“Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“How to describe hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of...if only, hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“just because life's meaningless dosent mean we can't experience it meaningfully”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“Reader, I ate him.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“You love life because life's all there is.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“And saying it--the first time we say it and mean it-- we cross over into that other world that has so far been no more than a suspicion or a dream. Saying it, we enter the golden realm where the old structures of doubt and the agony of incompleteness disappear, and the utterance itself is the first bright rung on the ladder of new possibility. What a relief! What a joyous relief from the distinctive weight of your own soul, to be able to look unguardedly into the eyes of another and say it, meaning it and heady with knowing you mean it: "I love you." If the wind had blown through me at that moment, my body would have sung like a chime.”
― Glen Duncan

“The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.”
― Glen Duncan, Hope

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smoke-blue and violet as night and morning changed shifts –- but how were they passing time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. E-mail. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses –- and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind you eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Then what happened next happened.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, Love Remains

“Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“For the love of Mary, I get it, she's got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try'n get back into it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I rather wished I'd stabbed him somewhere less awkward.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.....”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and part of us rejoices.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.”
― Glen Duncan

“Falling in love makes the unknown

known. Falling out of love

reverses the process.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I'm still bothered.
You're French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“He didn't protest much. Evidently he had a penchant for surrender.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I saw our future together compressed into a moment; our faces changing, desire having to cope and reinvent itself at each new stratum of familiarity; I saw the gradual dissolution of mutual mystery and romance, its succession by friendship and a sort of tranquil and supernatural loyalty; I felt - with great lightness of being - the bearability of the idea of death, if the life preceding it was bloodily commingled (in children) with hers. A humble little truth: build a truly good life and it will reward you with mastery of the fear of death. It was simple. Having committed to the building of a marriage and family, all sorts of truths came forward and offered themselves.”
― Glen Duncan

“Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“You know why they invented the phrase 'case closed'?

What?

So that the audience would know it wasn't.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“In my dreams a small wolf slept inside of me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved it’s heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up and touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man: A Novel

“This would be my torture: All that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do...
[Lucifer]”
― Glen Duncan

“The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf