Top 68 David James Duncan Quotes
#1. I simply knew, via song, sunlight, redwings and cottonwoods, that there was a world I was born to live in, that the men I was standing beside lived in another, and that as long as I remembered this their words would never hurt me again.
David James Duncan
#2. The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the "sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew." I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being.
David James Duncan
#3. I felt a rush of trust
felt that life might be not just tolerable but beautiful, if I could only remember to find the bare Present.
David James Duncan
#4. Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child. - Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers, trying to explain why he prefers younger ballplayers
David James Duncan
#5. I call hellfire a threat," Natasha said, " and 'love thy neighbor' a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.
David James Duncan
#6. Sinner" and "saint" are waves of differing size and magnitude on the surface of the same sea. Each is a natural outcome of forces in the universe; each is governed by time and causation. Nobody is utterly lost, and nobody need despair
David James Duncan
#7. He and Cease were united by karmic connections so essential to our mutual inner balance that the endless differences of our minds are a constant amusement to us both
David James Duncan
#8. I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I'd realized I didn't have to become them.
David James Duncan
#9. Besides a Scientist Marion is also a Pacifist and an Atheist. This means she is basically against most things, such as War, Sports, and God.
David James Duncan
#10. All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give.
David James Duncan
#12. But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.
David James Duncan
#13. Cause I'm a Christian. Or was. And Christ's love doesn't work, is what we feel in the Army. That kind of shit gets you killed here, it's an eye for an eye here, if Christ's love was real this whole war couldn't be happening.
David James Duncan
#14. The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard: government by force of farce.
David James Duncan
#16. And onto the screen pops a couple of housewives who start having a poop fit when they see how clean their new dish soap got the dinner plates
David James Duncan
#17. Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?
David James Duncan
#18. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.
David James Duncan
#19. The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest
David James Duncan
#20. When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.
David James Duncan
#21. Faith of Cranes is a love song to the beauty and worth of the lives we are able to lead in the world just as it is, troubled though it be ... The writing is honest, intensely lived, and overflowing with heart: broken, mended, and whole.
David James Duncan
#22. And like many a Christian before them, they completely forgot that the only sword-shaped weapon Jesus ever actually used was the one He died on.
David James Duncan
#23. Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain. - overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School
David James Duncan
#25. And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.
David James Duncan
#26. The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he'd inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.
David James Duncan
#27. An eye for an eye is smart, see, but love is dumb, lovers are fools.
David James Duncan
#29. The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.
David James Duncan
#30. But Mama was so mad at the insurance company that even though he used words like "flaming assholes" she didn't realize till later that he was cussing: she said she thought he was quoting the Psalms.
David James Duncan
#31. To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty.
David James Duncan
#32. Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it was a question mark all along.
David James Duncan
#33. The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.
David James Duncan
#34. It is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.
David James Duncan
#35. Fishing is like watching baseball, he says, in that it takes such total concentration that you shouldn't even be noticing little details like your arms and legs and head and mind and the miles- long strings of questions inside it.
David James Duncan
#36. Is a lifelong student of the world's wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that ridding the world of evil is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy and Mao Tse Tung.
David James Duncan
#37. But any gathering of eight human beings has an astounding potential for complication.
David James Duncan
#38. This man obviously contained some sort of catalytic converter that rendered the filth of his language as natural and inoffensive as dirt in a garden.
David James Duncan
#39. Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters ... Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.
David James Duncan
#41. My books are inert as cordwood till a reader's imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
David James Duncan
#42. More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less,
David James Duncan
#43. Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.
David James Duncan
#44. Bobby Edson, like most coaches, was a kind of mystic: he believed the cosmos was endowed with an ineffable muffling system that rendered all the racist, sexist, tasteless and denigrating remarks made by coaches inaudible to the students about whom they bellowed them.
David James Duncan
#45. Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches.
David James Duncan
#46. I said we aren't here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we're here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry up and get dead.
David James Duncan
#47. The best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.
David James Duncan
#49. The heart [is] an organ that I find, if you have faith and know how to surrender to it, unfolds and unfolds in a most wonderful an unscientific manner, till it becomes the vastest and most pristine wilderness in existence.
David James Duncan
#50. Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise. - Antonio Porchia
David James Duncan
#52. It's strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody's pet notion seems to agree with anybody else's.
David James Duncan
#53. I'd taken a big fat crisis off my shoulders and loaded it all on Jesus, which seemed unfair in a way, but was exactly what the Bible recommended.
David James Duncan
#54. Papa was no longer fixing a carburetor: he was setting up a greasy little Cuban missile base smack-dab in the middle of Mama's immaculate Washington, D.C. It was a flagrant act of war.
David James Duncan
#56. Peter didn't want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.
David James Duncan
#58. I'd trapped myself in a script ... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.
David James Duncan
#59. The only way I know to pluck from the hearts of enemies their desire to destroy us is to remove from their lives the sense that, for their own physical and spiritual survival, they must.
David James Duncan
#60. You, me, & your papa are 3 of the tiny percentage of souls on this miserable earth who've figured out that playing ball is the highest purpose God ever invented the human male body for.
David James Duncan
#61. I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
David James Duncan
#62. To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.
David James Duncan
#63. Your strange!" she gushed. (She meant "You're," but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it "Your.")
David James Duncan
#64. There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.
David James Duncan
#65. Not a Saint!" Akasha proclaimed, in bricks. "This is the Tomb of God Incarnate!"
"Always did figure that sucker was dead," muttered Waites.
David James Duncan
#66. But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.
David James Duncan
#67. To every Armageddonist, every earth lover must keep saying with all the sincerity and affection we can muster, May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me.
David James Duncan
#68. The principles that will save Earth's life are the same principles that save the living souls of humans: ineluctable spiritual principles.
David James Duncan
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