Vellum Quotes

“But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing them-selves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“She has to be written out of history and written into myth.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“Let sleeping gods lie.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old movies, he said - when you see this old parchment map just… getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just… fwoom”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“I miss Jack and Joey and Thomas. Nobody ever wonders if the dead grieve for the ones they leave behind, it seems, but I miss them, even if I’m not sure that they ever existed. If my whole world up until I found the Book was just the fantasy of a dead man wishing he was still alive, maybe they were only ever little parts of me that I snipped off and carved into a human shape to keep me company in that dream of life.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“It’s the dark world of the Kali Yuga, out here on the edge, the Gnostic prison-world of a mad, blind creator, a world of lies, truth hidden in the silky veils of Maya.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“Once upon a time," Finnan had told her, "there weren't any gods at all. Just human beings that lived and died and dreamed up foolish little fireside tales to make themselves feel a little warmer in the cold night. They looked out to the sunset and they thought to themselves, why that's so beautiful there must be something out there. They buried their dead in the ground and couldn't bear to think of them just rotting, so they told themselves there was a land under the earth where all the dead live on like us. Or maybe it was in the far north, or at the source of some great river, in the mountains, in the sky, wherever. But for all the adventurers and explorers that went wandering over the face of the earth, did any of them ever find anything but people, painted up and draped in skins and dancing like loonies to the moon, but people nonetheless? Did that stop them, though? No. Why, they says, if there's no Heaven then we'll fookin build one. If there's no gods out there, we'll raise ourselves up by our bootstraps, grab a star out of the sky and wear it as a fookin crown and we'll be gods our fookin selves. So they built themselves a language for a ladder and clambered up over their own words till they did it. Only they took so many stars out of the sky, ye seee, they left it full of holes, too weak to hold itself up, and so eventually, one day, the sky came crashing down on them so hard and heavy that it drove them right down into the earth, so deep that the only thing left of them sticking out was those crowns on their heads. Sure, there's those who somehow manage to stick their necks up out of the shite and look up into the ruins of Babel, read a few words written on the rubble, but at the end of the day, that's what we were and this what we are now, up to our necks in history, in humanity, and with no more choice about it than the poor dead bastards buried in the earth by all our ancestors.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum: The Book of All Hours Paperback – Deckle Edge, April 25, 2006

“Maybe there’s no secret essence inside me or you or them or anybody, nothing except what we choose for ourselves. No fate, no future, no past... except what we choose. No slaves and masters for the soul, only whores and politicians.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“So what if it’s Achilles’ mother who can have a son that’s greater than its father? What if it’s Io, too? What if it’s any girl, every girl? Any woman? Every woman, Anna. Sure and can’t any son be greater than his father? Isn’t that what it’s all about, what makes us all go on? Ye can’t look at the sheer bloody-minded defiance of a wee babe screaming its lungs out at the terrible injustice of the world and not have hope. Every generation of us, all born kicking up a racket, revels every one of us. So who’s the son— the child— that’s greater than its father? I’ll tell ye who it is, Anna.

Humanity.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“Dreams aren’t real? I say they walk among us, whispering in our ears all their sweet promises and threats, carried in our heads, mind-words, maggots eating at our dead souls. Dreams, memes, gods and monsters, creatures of the id. If they aren’t real then what the hell am I?”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“- Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.

- What is this? asked Inanna

- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum

“Come Neti, my chief keeper of the gates of Kur, and listen carefully to what I say: Lock up and bolt the seven gates of Kur, then, one by one, open each gate and let Innana enter through the crack. Bring her down. But as she enters, take her regal costume from her, take the crown, the necklace, and the beads that fall across her breast, the golden breastplate on her chest, the bracelet and the rod and line. Strip her of everything, even the royal robe, and let the holy priestess of the earth, the queen of heaven, enter here bowed low.”
― Hal Duncan, Vellum