The Brothers K Quotes

“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

“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

“--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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them-- learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it--phshhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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

“More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less,”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to “come to a head” and “demand to be dealt with.” But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some—like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree—quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don’t sense impending danger, we don’t feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“I think it might fly around and around in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside And from them on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled-up hose or a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I’d realized I didn’t have to become them.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“It is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“Peter didn’t want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“Your strange!” she gushed. (She meant “You’re,” but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it “Your.”)”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise. —Antonio Porchia”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“After watching what this purchase had cost Irwin and Linda, Amy and I chose a different path. Love, we figured, may be the best thing that ever happens between two people. And that the best thing is of no worldly worth struck us a beautiful paradox--and an endangered one. We therefore began fighting to defend the worthlessness of lovers everywhere in the only way we knew how: by vowing to remain as inseparable from each other, and as utterly useless to all opportunists, as the rest of our responsibilities would allow.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“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.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K