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Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1) QUOTES

Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1) QUOTES

1 " 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 (The Book of All Hours, #1)

2 " I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

3 " 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 (The Book of All Hours, #1)

4 " 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 (The Book of All Hours, #1)

5 " She has to be written out of history and written into myth. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

6 " 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 (The Book of All Hours, #1)

7 " 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 (The Book of All Hours, #1)

8 " The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

9 " Come Neti, my chief keeper of the gates of Kur, and listen carefully to what I say: Lock up and bolt the seven gates of Kur, then, one by one, open each gate and let Innana enter through the crack. Bring her down. But as she enters, take her regal costume from her, take the crown, the necklace, and the beads that fall across her breast, the golden breastplate on her chest, the bracelet and the rod and line. Strip her of everything, even the royal robe, and let the holy priestess of the earth, the queen of heaven, enter here bowed low. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

10 " - Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.

- What is this? asked Inanna

- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

11 " Maybe there’s no secret essence inside me or you or them or anybody, nothing except what we choose for ourselves. No fate, no future, no past... except what we choose. No slaves and masters for the soul, only whores and politicians. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

12 " Let sleeping gods lie. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)

13 " You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me. "

― Hal Duncan , Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1)