Glen Duncan > Quotes

“Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“Reader, I ate him.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“You love life because life's all there is.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“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

“I know what the majority of you think about all this. All this sex and money and drugs. You think: people who live like that never end up happy. You need to think that in just the way men with small penises need to think size doesn't matter. It's understandable. The rich, the famous, the big-dicked, the slim-and-gorgeous - they can incite an envy so urgent that you can escape it only by translating it into pity. People who live like that never end up happy. Yes, you're right. But neither do you. And in the meantime, they've had all the sex and drugs and money.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.”
― Glen Duncan, Love Remains

“Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“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

“Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“I'm supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, but when you get right down to it, I'm really only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's paved with intriguing questions. You want to know. Man do you want to know.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“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

“For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do...
[Lucifer]”
― Glen Duncan

“There's no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated - even mine {Lucifer}.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Hell [...] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“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, I, Lucifer

“I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident - everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.....”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“Falling in love makes the unknown

known. Falling out of love

reverses the process.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf