Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

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.

Grace only exists to be fallen from.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Every now and then you look out at the world and know its gods have gone utterly elsewhere. Its personality shows, the kid abandoned horribly early who's survived at too great a price.

You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.

This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.

GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live

Time does you this perverse service of expansion when all you've got to fill it with is horror.

GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live

The moon insists on simplicity. The free-verse epic becomes a sonnet, the sonnet a limerick, the limerick babytalk, the babytalk the beat of a drum. Eventually there's nothing but the rhythm of blind and deafened need. It's peace, of a sort, a return to original silence.

GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live

There's only one response God's got to anything you might care to tell Him--that your brother's dying of AIDS, for example, and that you'd really appreciate it if He could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle--and that response is: Yeah, I know.

You might be wondering--the hard-men among you, the nutters, the glassers, the thugs--whether you couldn't hack it in Hell, whether you couldn't, when it came right down to it, just butch the bastard out. Well guess what: You couldn't.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

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.

Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.

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

Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation's a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick.

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

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

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.

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.

You can't live solely for someone else without sooner or later hating them.

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

It's the postmodern solution ... Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.

At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It's hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there's only beauty left. What theory won't we espouse if it's beautiful? What atrocity won't we excuse?

You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.

The only thing to do with atrocity, it's been said, is to chronicle it. There's no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history's obligation to document the facts.

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

Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs 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.

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.

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

The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.

GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live

For the monster as for the earthworm as for the man the world hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain ...

GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live

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

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...