quotes by Glen Duncan

"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)

"Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from."
— Glen Duncan

"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)

"'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

"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

"You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned."
— Glen Duncan (Hope)

"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)