Quotes from David James Duncan

Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.

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

We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.

Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.

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.

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.

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.

Then in October, Indian Summer, the air turned so soft, the sunlight so fragile, and each day's loveliness so poignantly doomed that even self-ignorance and restlessness felt like profound states of being, and he just wandered the empty beaches and misty headlands in a state of serene confusion and awe.

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

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.

the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.

And into the brown paper bag of my heart, Eddy slipped a smile.