Home > Author > Glen Duncan
161 " It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina! "
― Glen Duncan , Talulla Rising (The Last Werewolf, #2)
162 " Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand. "
― Glen Duncan , By Blood We Live (The Last Werewolf, #3)
163 " For the longest time the romantic explanation for low rates of female infection endured: Possession of a womb, it was supposed, conferred a gentleness which simply could not bear the viciousness of a lycanthropic heart. Female werewolves, masculine idiocy maintained, must be killing themselves in crazy numbers...It's quite extraordinary, given the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary, how long this fallacy of the gentler sex lasted, but the twentieth century (years before Myra and the girls of Abu Ghraib put their two penn'orth in) pretty much did away with it. Now we know: If women don't catch the werewolf bug, it's certainly not because they're sugar and spice and all things nice. "
― Glen Duncan , The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf #1)
164 " We stayed like that, him watching me crying, for as long as we could stand it. Then he took a couple of paces away. The room needed a window for him to go to and look out of. I could feel the grammar of the moment demanding it. "
165 " But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. "
166 " Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain. "
― Glen Duncan , A Day and a Night and a Day
167 " You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body. "
168 " Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing . . . "
169 " Darkness now is pure phenomenon, nothing to do with him. This is the final relationship with the universe: you find solace only in things that offer none. "
170 " eyes: so transparently enslaved by the soul "
― Glen Duncan
171 " Thanks," she says - and suddenly tears well and fall. Augustus understands: not because she's suffered but because he's helping her. When you're a child people's cruelty makes you cry. When you're an adult it's their kindness. "
172 " Catholicism fascinated him, the contortions it put itself through to make ends meet. Father Murray had kept returning to the word 'despair.' There'd been a little (bizarre, Luke thought) linguistic diversion into Latin. Desperare, formed by the 'de' prefex, signifying the removal of or from, and 'sperare,' meaning to hope. The removal of hope. That was despair. The reasoning being that you couldn't live without hope. What Murray hadn't said (but what, along with the story of the suicide ghost, Luke remembered from childhood) was that despair was classified as a sin against the Holy Spirit. That was the perverse beauty of the religion: that your daughter could be raped and murdered and yourself still condemned for giving up hope. "
― Glen Duncan , Death of an Ordinary Man
173 " Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. "
174 " Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jeweled with tears. "
― Glen Duncan , I, Lucifer
175 " This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn’t buy it. “It’s possible,” I said. “Of course it’s possible.” “But you don’t think so” “No. I’m not sure why.” Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. “It’s because it would be less romantic,” she said. "
176 " Oy, Jake,” he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I’d disappointed with my weak will. “Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you …” He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior … “Actually I do know this is hard for you. I’m sorry. I’m not using my imagination. That was my New Year’s resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow’s shoes. That and to read one poem every day. "
177 " She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. "
178 " He says: ‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. "
179 " I suppose the word “unbearable” is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it. "
180 " He was quiet, cooperative. He'd made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It's a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job. "