Quotes from I, Lucifer

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

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

“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, quote from I, Lucifer

“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, quote from 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, quote from I, Lucifer

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

“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, quote from I, Lucifer

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

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

“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, quote from I, Lucifer

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

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

“Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smoke-blue and violet as night and morning changed shifts –- but how were they passing time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. E-mail. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses –- and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind you eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“(I invented rock and roll. You wouldn't believe the things I've invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money ... Let's save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which ... pretty much ... is everything in the world, isn't it? Gosh.)”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“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.)”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth -- and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“Temptation's less about wearing someone down with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and dropping it in at the right time.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do 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 . . .”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“All the metaphors in this world wouldn’t scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that’s just darkness. Don’t get me started on light. Really, don’t get me started on light.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

“The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you're putting money into evil and shit. And let's be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave . . .”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer

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Popular quotes

“I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.”
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“...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”
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“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”
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“They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen’s ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms.”
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“Spook smiled. "Elend is a forgetful scholar - twice as bad as Sazed ever was. He gets lost in his books and forgets about meeting he himself called. He only dresses with any sense of fashion because a Terriswoman bought him a new wardrobe. War has change him some, but on the inside, I think he's still just a dreamer caught in a world with too much violence.”
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