Sun House Quotes

“What you need to know is, he’s gonna worship you. It’s his heart. From now till you or he are done he’s gonna watch every twitch of your hands an’ legs an’ body, movement of your lips, dart of your eyes, till he knows your next move the instant you do. He’s gonna adore you, is what he’s gonna do. Unless you put him on a chain. Or in a pen. Or stuff him in a dorm room and leave him alone all day. Do that to this animal and his great heart’ll be ruined. What I want from you, Jamey, is to know there is no chance o’ that. Ever.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“I need to express love for the remnants of a planet that isn’t yet dead, and grief for the countless places that are.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“It’s good because the American Industrial answer is, ‘See which job pays the most as it destroys your ideals, self-esteem, body, and brain the slowest, shut your piehole, man your earth-murdering machine, and get to it, O disposable termite of industry!’ Such a fate is instructively horrible, because it shows us why vision quests are part of every culture but the corporate anti-culture”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“I love how quiet it gets when my brain can’t answer my heart.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Some things you just raise hell about and hope somebody smarter than you can fix it. —Wendell Berry”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Reasoning is important. But any form of reasoning that refuses to give way to intuition is akin to choosing not to scrape the ice off your windshield before driving to work in the morning. —Thomas Soames”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Our Church began murdering Anabaptists right and left.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.” Nothing”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“The world was made for the soul’s sake that the soul’s eye might be practiced and strengthened to bear the divine light…”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“To ask the source of the insane mercy moving through everything to change what’s unfolding is asking her to fix what’s never broken.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“The Inquisitors’ attack on her was rather like a pile of firewood condemning a life-giving fire in winter for not being unburned wood.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“It was a performance I want to remember forever, so I’ve not been back since.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Please don’t phone unless it’s an emergency. Anything you say, even ‘Merry Christmas,’ just hurts when it arrives through a piece of plastic held to my ear. It’s not that I’m trying to hurt you back. It’s just that phones, for us, became hopelessly loaded a long time ago. Since I don’t want you to worry about whether I’m alive, let’s try postcards. Short ones, please. I’m sorry I can’t talk anymore. I’m even sorrier for all the years that made it this way. Bye, Dave.” Click.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“We do not suddenly exchange our enslavement to the fogs and sufferings of our condition for a wholly conscious climb to a sunlit summit. What we experience is the total transformation of the nature of darkness itself.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“When we read Beguine accounts of annihilations, illuminations & awakenings we’re not idling the day away in some safe little Marvel comic or Hitchhiker’s Guide wonderment. We’re reading of the soul exploding into our insanely normal world in a blessedly abnormal state of awareness!”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“(There is no such thing as defeat in an act of compassion.)”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Countless human beings, in countless brutal ways, have been so thoroughly assaulted at some point in their lives that, though they survive, their former self does not.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Act after act of spontaneous self-sacrifice does not feel random. When probabilities are defied to save us again and again, we feel blessed whether we believe in a Blesser or not. Feeling more like a tree in a breeze than he had since his mother lived and thrived, Jamey surfed waves of gratitude into unconsciousness.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Vedic culture it’s understood, for instance, that we all possess three bodies—a knowledge body, a truth body, and a begotten body—and to learn to recognize the limits and strengths of each can be life-changing.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Loving anyone or anything, anywhere, is the only church.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Their androgyny feels more a spiritual than sexual mystery to those close to them. Is there a way of being beyond gender?”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“He learned how a few lines of well-chosen poetry could cause a person speaking in slogans and received language to tap hidden depths.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“not her “academic focus,” but her living guide to her inner self and native land, and as a result became almost constantly happy.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Lore took pleasure in sculpting a ball of dry lichen, placing a precision tipi of twigs over it, igniting the lichen, enjoying the twigs’ flare, and adding incrementally larger branches till a bright fire drove off the night chill.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“When the sun has set, moon has set, fire gone out, speech stopped, what serves as light for woman or man?”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“In my book, a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indians who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“experience? It’s common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Your storytelling songs are miracles of an old bardic power the world has nearly forgotten.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Six men in formation were swinging around leaf blowers so loud it seemed they were trying to scare the leaves back up onto the trees.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House