“Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“You love life because life's all there is.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“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, quote from 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, quote from The Last Werewolf
“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Falling in love makes the unknown
known. Falling out of love
reverses the process.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.....”
― Glen Duncan, quote from 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, quote from The Last Werewolf
“There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Werewolves are not the subject of academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Thus she's discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it...You do what you do because it's that or death.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation. Thus vampires spend a lot of time lounging around and staring out of the window and finding they can't be arsed.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“The collective human unconscious can't stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn't accident, it's deep species strategy.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“I rather wished I'd stabbed him somewhere less awkward.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“It’s just what you’re stuck with, the lousy furniture you can’t change. The educated me knows hell’s nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I’m going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way.”
“It’s the postmodern solution,” I said. “Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“It's a ridiculous story, of course, but history's full of ridiculous stories. 'You can't make this shit up,' one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don't ask me. I just work here.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
“Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from The Last Werewolf
Glen Duncan
Born place: Bolton, Lancashire, England, The United Kingdom
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“Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"
- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird”
― Jerzy Kosiński, quote from The Painted Bird
“It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same.”
― Katie McGarry, quote from Pushing the Limits
“And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'
Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from A Suitable Boy
“I still love you in my own fucked-up way.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from The Silver Linings Playbook
“He has his good side and his bad side. Very dark indeed is his majesty when he wants to be. When he was young, he made a choice, like a tree does when it decides to grow one way or the other. He grew large and green until he shadowed over the whole forest, but most of his branches are twisted.”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The House of the Scorpion
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