David James Duncan Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learned

• On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Feel

• The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river’s clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mind

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lover

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like

• And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Person

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Enemies

• 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

  Topics in Truth

• 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

  Topics in Trust, Uncategorized

• That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them– learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interesting

• Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Everybody

• But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Church

• 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

  Topics in Dream

• And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Some one has to do it.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pay

• Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put this way: Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right – for let them only doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic’s great rhetorical advantage in just ten words: There is no truth which stupidity can’t make use of.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer

• 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., which seemed unfair in a way, but was exactly what the Bible recommended.

  David James Duncan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Jesus

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Faith

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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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Births

• 1882 - Moritz Schlick
• 1925 - Rod Steiger
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Deaths

• 1950 - Sri Ramana Maharshi
• 1924 - Louis Sullivan
• 1685 - Thomas Otway
• 2012 - Jonathan Frid
• 2010 - Alice Miller