Top 80 Glen Duncan Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Glen Duncan

2. “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

3. “Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?”

— Glen Duncan

4. “Time, you’ll be pleased to know – and since one must start somewhere – was created in creation. 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

5. “You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.”

— Glen Duncan

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

— Glen Duncan

7. “I’m in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.”

— Glen Duncan

8. “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

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

— Glen Duncan

10. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

11. “My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God – then having it taken away, forever.”

— Glen Duncan

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

— Glen Duncan

13. “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

14. “Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.”

— Glen Duncan

15. “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

16. “The message is clear: By all means become an abomination – but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”

— Glen Duncan

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

— Glen Duncan

18. “Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.”

— Glen Duncan

19. “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

20. “My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.”

— Glen Duncan

21. “The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it’s paved with intriguing questions.”

— Glen Duncan

22. “There is no God and that’s His only commandment.”

— Glen Duncan

23. “I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans.”

— Glen Duncan

24. “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

25. “Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don’t belong.”

— Glen Duncan

26. “Just because life’s meaningless doesn’t mean we can’t experience it meaningfully.”

— Glen Duncan

27. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

28. “He was quiet, cooperative. He’d made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It’s a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job.”

— Glen Duncan

29. “Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they’d fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn’t help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.”

— Glen Duncan

30. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

31. “There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.”

— Glen Duncan

32. “Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.”

— Glen Duncan

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

— Glen Duncan

34. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

37. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

38. “Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.”

— Glen Duncan

39. “Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.”

— Glen Duncan

40. “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.”

— Glen Duncan

41. “Hot tip: If you’re a human having a fling with a werewolf, break it off. Now.”

— Glen Duncan

42. “Every present anger derives from past weakness.”

— Glen Duncan

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

— Glen Duncan

44. “All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its... motivation.”

— Glen Duncan

45. “One knows one’s madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.”

— Glen Duncan

46. “It’s Big Brother with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon.”

— Glen Duncan

47. “One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.”

— Glen Duncan

48. “I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress.”

— Glen Duncan

49. “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

50. “The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis.”

— Glen Duncan