Glen Duncan Quotes

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

You love life because life's all there is.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.

What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.

That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.

This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

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.

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.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.

Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

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.

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.