“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, quote from Vellum
“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, quote from Vellum
“She has to be written out of history and written into myth.”
― Hal Duncan, quote from Vellum
“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, quote from Vellum
“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, quote from Vellum
“- 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, quote from Vellum
Hal Duncan
Born place: in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, Scotland, The United Kingdom
Born date October 21, 1971
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“If, as has been said, man learned to lie an hour after he learned to talk, then a phenomenon such as the one we’re discussing would be the genesis of the most fundamental change in human knowledge since the beginning of society; the transformations it would wreak—in fields from communications to ethics, in our most basic concepts, in every detail of daily existence—would be so profound that it is difficult to even conceive what life would be like in a subsequent new era of truth. The world as we know it would be irrevocably changed, right down to its very roots.”
― David R. Hawkins, quote from Power vs. Force
“To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time.
But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time.
Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind.
The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience.
Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.”
― David Mazzucchelli, quote from Asterios Polyp
“And if you decide to cancel it, make sure you notify Principal Winston and the student council. Although, I wouldn’t want to be the one to disappoint the entire school”
― Rachel Renée Russell, quote from Dork Diaries Book 2: Tales from a Not-So-Popular Party Girl
“And he had it all over Octavian, let me tell you. Hung like a Pegasus, he was.”
― Rob Thurman, quote from Deathwish
“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
The Temporal Void
The Naked God
Babel-17
Out of the Easy
Mom & Me & Mom
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