Quotes from David James Duncan

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.

People who vote for candidates bought by private business interests are not politically free in any real sense.

Not a Saint!" Akasha proclaimed, in bricks. "This is the Tomb of God Incarnate!" "Always did figure that sucker was dead, muttered Waites.

Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer, and the trenches in World War I.

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.

Papa was no longer fixing a carburetor: he was setting up a greasy little Cuban missile base smack-dab in the middle of Mama's immaculate Washington, D.C. It was a flagrant act of war.

him, trying to do the same.

an eye for an eye is smart, see, but love is dumb, lovers are fools.

Sister Durrel is so beautiful compared to everything else at Sabbath school it's like my eyeballs turn into compass needles, and she's North.

Because sometimes happy songs will make sad people miserable, because they feel guilty that they aren't happy, on top of the sadness. But a sad song talks to the part that hurts, says, Yeah I know, yeah it's bad, yeah it hurts: but I'm with you. I feel it too.

When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly 'in the world' in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.

but Mama was so mad at the insurance company that even though he used words like "flaming assholes" she didn't realize till later that he was cussing: she said she thought he was quoting the Psalms.

Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child. —Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers,        trying to explain why he prefers younger ballplayers

There is no activity so conducive to the health and happiness of a civilized man as angling with an artificial fly. As for the uncivilized, who would care to contemplate what writhing creatures their inchoate consciences allow them to skewer upon a hook?

Hmm. I'd never thought of that. Papa knew things I couldn't possibly know. He was in his thirties. He was old.

Cause I'm a Christian. Or was. And Christ's love doesn't work, is what we feel in the Army. That kind of shit gets you killed here, it's an eye for an eye here, if Christ's love was real this whole war couldn't be happening.

Fishing is like watching baseball, he says, in that it takes such total concentration that you shouldn't even be noticing little details like your arms and legs and head and mind and the miles- long strings of questions inside it.

This was what Joon thought Christianity meant! Food and medicine for the body, and stories for the heart if you begged for them. Then he came here, found a country full of people begging not to hear the stories, went to seminary, and found out why. No food. No medicine. No doing unto others. Just a bunch of men learning how to bellow the stories at others whether they wanted to hear them or not!

Besides a Scientist Marion is also a Pacifist and an Atheist. This means she is basically against most things, such as War, Sports, and God.

It's strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody's pet notion seems to agree with anybody else's.

Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain. —overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School

choke on blood, if I speak. But then words well right up with the blood, I'm helpless to stop them: "I know you hate the mill," I tell him, and tears come the instant I speak. "I know you love baseball, and aren't doing what you want. But at least Vera fights. She says her dopey prayers no matter what!" I lean against the door, gasping for air and strength to finish. "All I want is for you to fight, Papa. To fight to stay alive inside! No matter what.

You and I didn't make it close enough to Spring for you to learn this about me, but I've never liked to pick flowers. Blossoming is a sexual activity, and anything engaged in sex, ought, it seems to me, to be left alone.

Baseball -and I mean professional baseball- has got damned near every problem that churches and religion have got.