Quotes from David James Duncan

The principles that will save Earth's life are the same principles that save the living souls of humans: ineluctable spiritual principles.

My books are inert as cordwood till a readers imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.

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.

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.

Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?

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.

Life is short. It's God's fault. Sorry.

More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less

that was the thing about nature: make one lousy rule to describe it and it'll contradict you even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do it. and so what? if anybody grew wise enough to grasp the real immutable laws of nature, nature'd only rear back and strike 'em dead before they got anybody to understand them

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.

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.

I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I'd realized I didn't have to become them.

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.

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.

the only unfailing guide I've ever found through the innumerable blind alleys of my life as a writer, man, husband, father, citizen, steward, or believer, is the love burning in my heart. for me, prayer is about one thing: making contact with that love. though it burns in there like a candle flame, hot, bright, beautiful, love's flame is so fragile… keeping one's love burning, and living in accord with that burning: this, to me, is prayer.

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.

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

I loved the solar smile he would turn on his friends at times--and on me--nonplussing us when he simply left it on us, full-beam, for such a long, long moment that we'd finally have no choice but to realize this was no social smile, no rote kind of friendliness: this was what it felt like to be completely seen and loved for a moment.

But any gathering of eight human beings has an astounding potential for complication.

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.

That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it's also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That's why, until they're equipped with some sort of flush or filter or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I'll not trust the things.

I'm just saying that his card-burning would have meant far more, on the day he did it, if he hadn't already incinerated his life.

To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty.

Peter didn't want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.