David James Duncan Quotes

• 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

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• I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted Soap Mahoney-type guy went around the world smashing every clock in sight till there weren’t any more and people got so confused about when to go to the mill or school or church that they gave up and did something interesting instead.

  David James Duncan

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• 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

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• At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn’t miserable anymore: I wasn’t anything at all. I was a nothing– a random configuration of molecules.

  David James Duncan

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• Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted “it takes a village”.

  David James Duncan

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• A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing.

  David James Duncan

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• Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community.

  David James Duncan

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• The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child’s exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the post pubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants.

  David James Duncan

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• This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one’s parents since infancy.

  David James Duncan

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• When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don’t crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America).

  David James Duncan

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• 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

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• Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

  David James Duncan

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• But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace.

  David James Duncan

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• The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness.

  David James Duncan

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•  It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life.

  David James Duncan

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• Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting.

  David James Duncan

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• And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. 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

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• Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away.

  David James Duncan

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• 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

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• My sense of the world as a gift, my sense of a grace operative in this world despite its terrors, propels me to allow the world to open my heart still wider, even if the openness comes by breaking—for I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful.

  David James Duncan

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David James Duncan (46)

Birth:	1952
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist

About

David James Duncan is an American novelist and essayist, best known for his two bestselling novels, The River Why and The Brothers K. Both received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers award; The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book in 1992 and won a Best Books Award from the American Library Association.

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Today's Anniversary - 31st March

Births

• 1812 - Thomas Gold Appleton
• 1927 - William Daniels
• 1934 - Richard Chamberlain
• 1938 - David Steel
• 1972 - Alejandro Amenabar

Deaths

• 1894 - William Robertson Smith
• 1976 - Paul Strand
• 2002 - Barry Took
• 1931 - Knute Rockne