Gene Doucette Quotes

[T]he truth is the percentage of vampires that are also evil killers is about the same as the percentage of normal people who are also evil killers.

The dragon roared. Terrible sound, that. Made my testicles shrink.

I'm a pretty sad example of what one should do with eternal life. I've never reached any higher level of consciousness, I don't have access to any great truths, and I've never borne witness to the divine or transcendent. Some of this is just bad luck. Like working in the fishing industry in Galilee and never once running into Jesus.

The biblical Goliath was also a demon, which should tell you plenty about the accuracy of that little story, because it'd take a hell of a lot more than a stupid slingshot to take out a demon. (David actually lured Goliath under a cliff face and had some friends drop a big rock on him.)

Between you and me, Plato was a hack. All that crap about higher forms and caves? He was drunk when he wrote it. I know. I was there.

The thing is, we all have a little animal in us, and if you ask us to, we can do a very good job of behaving like one.

(A note: succubi are notorious amateur psychologists and have been since well before Freud. In fact I have it on good authority that Freud stole his whole gig from a particularly talkative succubus he used to know. And if you don't believe Freud knew a succubus, you haven't read Freud.)

[T]here may be no more depressing place on the planet than the floor of a casino.

I was suicidal for two solid centuries once. That was during the early part of what they now call the Dark Ages, in medieval Europe. Suicidal tendencies were de rigueur at the time, and I'm nothing if not trendy.

Most every old civilizations looks at others--members of the same species but not of the same tribe--as wild men. It's a common rationalization, because when you reduce someone else to a level of something like an animal, it makes them easier to kill.

[K]nowing one's fate never made a whit of difference, except it made the fated a tad more anxious.

Karyos's people adopted an ingenious, if somewhat perplexing attitude that life was a circle. Not like Disney's circle of life thing, which was really just a nice way to say, "death is normal, children, so suck it up.

I know in another decade or two I'm going to have to get used to the idea of reading without paper in my hands, but I'm going to be making that trip kicking and screaming. Maybe that sounds stubborn, but my relationship with the printed word is the longest one I've ever had and I'm not ready to quit on it yet.

We just met and we're already doing heroin?" I said. "Seems sudden.

[M]ost of the people I have ever met who claim not to care about money already have more than they could ever need.

The advent of civilization--an overly optimistic word--didn't change things as much as one might think, because no matter how large a city or empire became there was always another "them" to go out and kill. And when organized religion really got going... well, there's a fantastic excuse to murder people in bunches.

(As a side note: I thought money was a bad idea way back when it was first invented. I remember the moment very clearly. This guy owed me a sheep, but instead of giving me an actual sheep he gave me five coins he said were worth the same as a sheep. "But I can't eat round pieces of metal, asshole," were my exact words.)

So, you'd rather just regurgitate what these books tell you than know what really happened?"

"Exactly."

"No quest for truth? Where's your spirit of exploration?"

"You never went to college, did you?

(Most jobs I've had have been variations on hunter-gatherer and farmer. I was one of the first to say "Hey, if we grow our own food, we won't have to hunt it down all the time." Mostly, I was just tired of moving around constantly, but you have to admit it was a pretty good idea.)

So, what do I call you?" I asked.

"Whomp."

"Whomp? Your given name?"

"It's the sound people make when I hit them in the chest.

Religious fanatics are the worst. They're basically impossible to bargain with, they accept no outside opinion about anything, and they departed from reality well before you met them.

...while there may have been gods, they weren't particularly well defined. If, for instance, something unusually lucky happened, one might declare that a god--pick one--was feeling generous that day. And if a particularly bad thing happened, a god (usually a different one) was upset about something or other. Gods, in other words, were what most of us would now call chance or luck. And in that sense they served their purpose, by making a random existence seem less random.

To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex ("the gods wish us to have sex" is the oldest pickup line in the world).