|
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, Talulla Rising
As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
We're alone in the darkness ... so we hold hands and tell stories of good and evil to comfort each other. It works, for a while, for a life, for a civilization, perhaps for as long as the species survives. But have no illusion: it makes no difference to the darkness. The darkness swallows us all--good and evil alike--with monolithic disinterst.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
Lose possession of your child once and the fear it'll happen again becomes your resident hair-trigger insomniac. Once a bad mother, always a bad mother. It's like being an alcoholic: you only ever haven't fallen of the wagon yet.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Comedy, of course, lives for serious moments.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
The world is a series of vivid clues to the riddles beyond appearances. The world has a purpose, a pattern, a story, a plot.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Did you ever have a dream you were dreaming? You know. In your dream ... in you're dream you're having a dream. Dreams are the nearest univers parallele. Like the universe next door. So when you dream, you're really entering the universe next door. But if you dream you're dreaming, that's the universe NEXT to the universe next door ...
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
All love's details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
No one wants it to be true. But the truth doesn't care what anyone wants.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Wars start like this. Cultures gamble decadence and death will win them rebirth, watch themselves sliding into it, knowing it's an all-or-nothing bet.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Joy is circulatory. There is the joy. Then disbelief that says you must be dreaming. Then the mental pause or step back to give the universe a chance to wake you. Then the return to see if the joy is still there--and there is the joy again, insanely real and undeservedly all yours.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
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, Talulla Rising
The Devil's subtlest temptations are the ones you yield to without even knowing you've given in.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete control over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
Love's the big hint life can't stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Dreams were in the same bag as Meaning and Things Happening For A Reason and God.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
In the twenty-first century the gizmos to be scared of are the ones that look like they don't do much.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Having money now--a lot of money--I knew one thing for sure: If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you'd be miserable poor. You'd be miserable, just without the consolation of quality towels and thirty-dollar cocktails.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Beauty just keeps coming into the world and passing away, coming in and passing away. You can't blame beauty. Beauty doesn't know what else to do.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
When combat brings death close you realise you never thought you'd die. Not this time, you tell yourself, before you go in. This time is always not the time. Has to be, otherwise, you'd never go in.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Absurdity has a momentum you can surrender to. As does exhaustion.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Laughter was absent from her life. Unless strategic or issued in triumph at some further depth she'd managed to go down to.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
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, By Blood We Live
The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Night again. Darkness goes into you like ink into water.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Was there anything other than sunshine a vampire ended up wanting? Is there anything other than what we don't have that we all end up wanting?
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Time was like someone alongside me who could be unpredictable, could nudge me into something stupid.
GLEN DUNCAN, By Blood We Live
Silence stopped us slipping into the lousy script.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
You didn't die. That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it.
GLEN DUNCAN, Talulla Rising
|
