Vellum
Hal Duncan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“She has to be written out of history and written into myth.”
“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?”
“I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself.”
“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”
“You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me.”
“The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts.”
“So what if it’s Achilles’ mother who can have a son that’s greater than its father? What if it’s Io, too? What if it’s any girl, every girl? Any woman? Every woman, Anna. Sure and can’t any son be greater than his father? Isn’t that what it’s all about, what makes us all go on? Ye can’t look at the sheer bloody-minded defiance of a wee babe screaming its lungs out at the terrible injustice of the world and not have hope. Every generation of us, all born kicking up a racket, revels every one of us. So who’s the son— the child— that’s greater than its father? I’ll tell ye who it is, Anna. Humanity.”
“Maybe there’s no secret essence inside me or you or them or anybody, nothing except what we choose for ourselves. No fate, no future, no past... except what we choose. No slaves and masters for the soul, only whores and politicians.”
“Dreams aren’t real? I say they walk among us, whispering in our ears all their sweet promises and threats, carried in our heads, mind-words, maggots eating at our dead souls. Dreams, memes, gods and monsters, creatures of the id. If they aren’t real then what the hell am I?”
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Book Keywords:
society, humanity, hatred, spirit, monsters, destiny, future, soul, dreams, inhumanity, fate, io, greatness, history, achilles, fear, outcast
