Talulla Rising Quotes

“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“He loved the feel and smell of her palm and because he was one of those men who was always ultimately looking to dissolve himself into a woman.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn't strike you down. The sky didn't fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out... It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience. I picture it as an electrical discharge, entering at my soles and racing upwards in haywire detonations that shock the bones and explode the neurons. The magic's dark red, violent, compressed. I get random flashes of mundane memory-- pushing a shopping cart around Met Foods; opening my apartment window; standing on a subway platform; saying to someone, No, that's carbohydrates in the evenings-- intercut with images of the kills; a white male body on an oil-stained warehouse floor; a solitary trailer with a storm lamp burning; a female thigh releasing a dark arc of blood; my clawed hand scooping out a still-hot heart. This is the Curse's neatest trick: one type of memory doesn't destroy the other. It's still you. It's still all you. You wouldn't think you were built to bear such opposites, but you are. You'd think the system would crash, but it doesn't.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.

Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Life, the dramatist of speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“but it was humanly good to be touched too, to be alone with someone at the secret feast that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. You looked at each other and felt just how old the contract was, the warm-faced commitment to the adventure, the stepping together out of the light into the rewarding darkness.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“The Russian drove. New York turned in his seat to make sure I wasn't peeking. He should have been a surfer. His face was full of masculine prettiness and immensely likeable. Which, by horror's law of inverted aesthetics, made me sure we were being taken to our deaths.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina!”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“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 ”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Fuck the miracle of life, where do I sign up for a hysterectomy?”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“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.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually...”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“Do you know how few men there are worth having?”
― glen duncan, Talulla Rising

“shoved by shock too young into the truth that nothing meant anything.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising