Hal Duncan > 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

“We are our own worst enemies. How banal and trite that sounds, but [...] have come to believe that all the greatest truths are trite and banal, when spoken aloud in their simplest and most honest terms. Perhaps they can only be imparted in the Cant, in a language which writes itself onto your heart so that you understand not just the words but all the shattering ramifications of of a sentence which, when heard without true understanding, seems quite risibly simplistic.
We are our own worst enemies.
People die.”
― Hal Duncan, Ink

“A ship with two of every animal in the world, my friend? That would have to be a very large ship indeed. Is that how you would save a world? A bull and a cow, a sheep and a ram, and so on? The people who wrote your Torah, my friend, must have had poor livestock if they raised their herds from only one dam and one sire, breeding sisters with their brothers, any herdsman knows that this does not produce a healthy flock.

No, my friend to save the world you save the knowledge of that world, the knowledge that there were bulls and cows in it, that there were sheep and rams in it, that there were men and women who lived and died. If your world is to be destroyed, all you can save my friend, is the knowledge of it, to restore what you once had, to mourn what can never be restored.”
― Hal Duncan, Ink

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

“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

“No, we're not prisoners of flesh, I think, bound in our skins, and only waiting for the final judgment that will send us into fire or light. We're fucking prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear and shame. We're fucking prisoners of sorrow, and it's time for our release.”
― Hal Duncan, Ink

“Find the truth and spread the lie.”
― Hal Duncan, Ink

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

“So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.”
― Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites

“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

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

“The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.”
― Hal Duncan, Ink

“I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick’s coffee.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.”
― Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites

“–I’m not like that, he says. I’m not a …
Fairy?
–Every time you say that, I whisper, a little part of you will die.”
― Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites

“But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird.”
― Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites

“We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there’s that SCI-FI shit.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“– Burning lemurs of bloody Madagascar!”
― Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites

“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

“Popular and unpopular don’t necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement, the effects of strangeness rather than the cause. These quirks – dragons, spaceships, magic, FTL – are not things which, in and of themselves, make fiction strange. Rather they are the epiphenomena of an underlying process of semiosis, figurae generated and combined to create meaning, gaining their symbolic power by their application. Genre is not a question of which trove of tropes one uses, of a characteristic set of quirks; rather it is a quality emergent from the underlying dynamics of modalities, the nature of the impossibilities and our affective responses to them – the uncertainties and ethical imperatives too, if we include epistemic and deontic quirks in our scope along with the alethic and boilomaic.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Susurrus is a different kind of flirt though, fickle as a godling of wind can only be but light and warm as one father, bold as the other. And his is a different kind of love, one that has lasted near as long as this world has now and stayed as fresh somehow, even in his flightiness. It is Susurrus makes her sigh for those days, even though he makes them all sigh.”
― Hal Duncan, Susurrus on Mars

“One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Susurrus whispers through the grass and gorse, godling of the Martian wind, gene-spliced tyke of Zephyros and Ares. His story needs no Ovid, tells itself in the rustle of striplings and flowers he loves, the tale that he is: a zygote collaged from: spermatazoa flensed to nuclear caducei; a mathematical transform by the Fréres Fourier, Jean and Charles, flip of an axis changing Y to X; and the egg from which Eros hatched, is always hatching, offered up blithely to a god of war gone broody, Ares a sharper marksman than any brat with bow and arrow, no more to be argued with than the groundling Renart in a frum.”
― Hal Duncan, Susurrus on Mars

“The quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“HARD SF and EPIC FANTASY – both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid GENRES in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“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