David James Duncan Quotes

• 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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• If my heart still beat I didn’t know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.

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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.

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• I truly and deeply wanted to kill him. And I believe I could have done it, with nothing but my hands. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Peter had an arm around me. “Let it go, Kade,” he was whispering very gently, though his arm was nearly crushing me. “Open your fists,” he said, “and let go of the coals.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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