Welcome to my commonplace blog

The goal of this blog is to preserve a few ideas and quotes from books I read. In the old days when books were not so readily available, people kept "commonplace books" where they copied choice passages they wanted to be able to remember and perhaps reuse. The idea got picked up by V.F.D. and it's common knowledge that most of that organization's volunteers have kept commonplace books, and so have Laura and I.

I'm sure there are many other Internet sites and blogs dedicated to the same idea. But this one is mine. Feel free to look around and leave comments, but not spam.

17 November 2011

The Last Werewolf (Glen Duncan)

A pretty nasty book with "guilty pleasure" written all over it. One can feel the catharsis the author must have had when writing this. In the end a pretty good book if you can stand the nastiness, which is, i realize, more or less the point. In a world where morality has been transcended, questions of good and evil keep popping up at inconvenient times. Can true love really exist between werewolves? And what would Buffy do?


Quotes:

In Buffy there’d be a howlers’ singles bar or dating agency. Not in the real world.

Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants.

I knew—it was passed from him to me, the old dull divine truth—that no ecstatic union compares with killing the thing you love.

You don’t know what you’ve been waiting for until it arrives. We froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, “It’s you.”

I could never have not loved her without becoming someone else. But I had become someone else.

At the true end of life one doesn’t care how one’s come to death. I wasn’t Jacob, or her husband, or her killer, or a monster; I was just the thing that had unlocked the door.

In fact let me deal with this as straightforwardly as possible: Werewolves and vampires don’t get on.

Half the “reconstruction” contracts for postwar Iraq went on no-bids to vampire-owned companies (whose funding favours, dear President Obama, the Republicans will be calling in about now).

He stood in the kitchen doorway, a lean pug-faced young vampire in combat trousers and leather bike jacket with eyebrow piercings and bleached white hair cropped close to his skull, holding a bulky rifle.

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up.

being forced into something when all I wanted was nothing

You love life because life’s all there is, Harley had insisted. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment.

Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.

READER, I ATE HIM.

You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate.

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.

Humanity’s getting its metamorphic kicks elsewhere these days. When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?

The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways.

“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money.

Somewhere in the sex was the understanding that love was among other things making room for the beloved’s irrational vengeances.

Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.

Evil has to be chosen.

His consciousness was like a lethal ocean undertow. Before you knew it you were in colder water, miles from shore.

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