The Horned Man Quotes

“I thought of the three of us—myself, Trumilcik, and Elaine—each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality. The phone rang.”
― James Lasdun, The Horned Man: A Novel

“Something—his slightly abnormal shortness, I suppose—made me suddenly think that, like many people who abuse their power over others, he had carried into adulthood some ancient sense of himself as a victim. I felt certain that he saw himself as the weaker party here; entitled—even obliged—to use any weapon he could: that he wasn’t so much trying to possess the girl as conducting an ongoing act of defiance against the hand nature had dealt him as a physical specimen; a hand that appeared to have ruled beauty of the order this girl possessed forever out of reach. But although I sympathized with him for this, I held him entirely responsible for what he was doing.”
― James Lasdun, The Horned Man: A Novel