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| If it is possible to speak of a "man" with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a "man" with a feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman" as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
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| The point, my dears, is not good nor evil -- but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I'm honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you're after, then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't even know God -- the fish in the pond who doesn't know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .
Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they're so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I've no idea why. There's no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated -- even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs -- they're all doing it for something, even if they're doing it for pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that's a different question.) Evil for its own sake is -- or would be if it existed -- madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That's the crux of it. That's what He can't stand.
- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
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| I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine.) Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of . . . If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.)
- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
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| Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human head, human scale with angelic head -- oy. You go dizzy. What does one do -- having been immaterially present at the Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being -- what does one do with...a daisy? How is consciousness -- especially the troubled hybrid I'm walking around with at the moment -- to reconcile these extremities? Having observed newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void, having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly 'twixt time's wrinkles and matter's loops -- how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet's toenails? Am I to apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?
- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
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| The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.
- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
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