Quotes from David James Duncan

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

And onto the screen pops a couple of housewives who start having a poop fit when they see how clean their new dish soap got the dinner plates

All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give.

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

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

Your strange!" she gushed. (She meant "You're," but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it "Your.")

If we can't be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein' a Buddhist.

Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise. —Antonio Porchia

It's incredible to me how blithely even intelligent people sometimes toss around terms like "transcendence" and "crucifixion." The words move us on paper. They feel noble upon the tongue. But when they cease to be sounds and begin to caress the flesh and bones, when they leave the page and get physical, there is little that even the best of us woudn't do to escape them.

Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are--if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are--we're already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I'm dead. The hell with me.

he and Cease were united by karmic connections so essential to our mutual inner balance that the endless differences of our minds are a constant amusement to us both

There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.

The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he'd inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.

There were some crucial things Vera's parents were forgetting about crosses, was what Peter said. One was that Jesus was nailed to His by enemies, not by Mary and Joseph. And another, he said, was that it killed Him. Christ's cross killed Him. We've got to remember what crosses are, Peter said. They're not just decorations on steeples. They're murder weapons, he said, the same as guns, or gas chambers, or electric chairs.

I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.

He said there are two ways for a hitter to get the pitch he wants. The simplest way is not to want any pitch in particular. But the best way, he said -- which sounds almost the same, but is really very different -- is to want the very pitch you're gonna get. Including the one you can handle. But also the one that's gonna strike you out looking. And even the one that's maybe gonna bounce off your head.

I said we aren't here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we're here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry up and get dead.

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.

This man obviously contained some sort of catalytic converter that rendered the filth of his language as natural and inoffensive as dirt in a garden.

She might be all right, Freddy said. But she sure is dead.

I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are - if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead.

The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard: government by force of farce.

I simply knew, via song, sunlight, redwings and cottonwoods, that there was a world I was born to live in, that the men I was standing beside lived in another, and that as long as I remembered this their words would never hurt me again.

I'm back!" he told Life.