# Andy Duncan (writer)

Andy Duncan (born September 21, 1964) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.

## Quotes
### Short fiction
#### Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (2000)

    Page numbers from the hardcover first edition, published by Golden Gryphon Press, ISBN 0-9655901-1-9, first printing
    See Andy Duncan's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details
    Spelling and italics as in the book
* “Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was. “That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.”
** Beluthahatchie (p. 7)
* Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!
** Grand Guignol (p. 42)
* She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it.
** Lincoln in Frogmore (p. 143)
* I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman.
** Lincoln in Frogmore (p. 147)
* Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse.
** Lincoln in Frogmore (p. 151)
* People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe.
** Lincoln in Frogmore (p. 160)
* Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints.
** From Alfano’s Reliquary (pp. 178-179)
* Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome. In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before.
** From Alfano’s Reliquary (p. 180)
* I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far. Less and less of God, and more and more of man It is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike.
** From Alfano’s Reliquary (p. 182)
* “I don’t allow officers to mince words with me, Colonel. You must speak freely and frankly.” “General, they are ignoramuses.” “I believe the phrase you were groping for, Colonel, is goddamn worthless ignoramuses, but you’re definitely on the right track.
** Fortitude (p. 225)
* I went, shouted louder and louder, tried to clear my mind so that, when necessary, I could act without thinking, act like a soldier.
** Fortitude (p. 228)
* In everyone’s life there are crossroads, moments of decision, however insignificant. To spot the crucial moments in his life, and act, makes a great soldier. To spot the crucial moments on a larger scale, a grand scale—that’s the work of a general.
** Fortitude (p. 258)
* It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it.
** Fortitude (p. 258)