quotes by 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."
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

"We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence. "
— David James Duncan

"The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic's great rhetorical advantage in just ten words:

There is no truth which stupidity can't make use of.

Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put this way:

Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right – for let them only doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Some one has to do it."
— David James Duncan

"[There is a] kind of all-embracing universality evident in Mother Teresa’s prayer: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Not just fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, Indians. The whole world. It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside... [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."
— David James Duncan

"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

"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. "
— David James Duncan (River Teeth)

"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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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."
— David James Duncan

"In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness?"
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

"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 (My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark)

"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). 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. 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 postpubescent 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."
— David James Duncan (The River Why)

"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. "
— David James Duncan (River Teeth)

"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."
— David James Duncan

"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"
— David James Duncan

"The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable."
— David James Duncan (My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark)

"But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches."
— David James Duncan

"Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees."
— David James Duncan (The River Why)

"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"."
— David James Duncan

"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."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"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."
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

"Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?"
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"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."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

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

"...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""
— David James Duncan (River Teeth)

"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."
— David James Duncan (My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark)

"JUDAS PRIEST BUDDHIST PRIEST! WILL YOU SET THE FUCKIN' HOOK?"
— David James Duncan (My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark)

"But any gathering of eight human beings has an astounding potential for complication."
— David James Duncan

"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."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"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."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"Fiction writing feels more honest to me."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"Before coming to the Tamawanis I'd believed that solitude was a cure-all, a psychic panacea, an invisible knife certain to cut me clear ...; I'd believed that solitude would free me and, alone and independent, I would make myself into the person I wanted to be. But solitude, I found, was not guarantee of anything. Day after day, I stood alone ... and Presto! a swarm of hobgoblins came scuttling into my skull, hunkered down like hobos under a bridge and proceeded to yammer at the tops of their lungs! One voice would belt out some facile ditty ...; a second would join in with obscene or idiotic scraps of doggerel trying to drown out the first; the third was my critic, pitching me shit, calling me names, giving me grief over every [thing]. This one had a brother, the Whiner and most obnoxious of all, the Gloater. I was free, I was alone. It was hell. The confusion, the misery, the stupidity - all of it followed me from Portland to the Tamanawis, and in the quiet, it grew fecund and multipled. It came from nobody but me.

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. One either needed wisdom or tree-bark insensitivity to confront such a fearsome freedom."
— David James Duncan (The River Why)