“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brothers K
“I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.”
― David James Duncan, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brothers K
“More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less,”
― David James Duncan, quote from The Brothers K
“It is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.”
― David James Duncan, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brothers K
“If we can’t be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein’ a Buddhist.”
― David James Duncan, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brothers K
“Peter didn’t want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.”
― David James Duncan, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brothers K
“I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.”
― David James Duncan, quote from The Brothers K
David James Duncan
Born place: in Portland, OR, The United States
Born date January 1, 1952
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“Didn’t I advise you to forget the stone? Didn’t I tell you it would be mine? Look at everything you’ve lost.” He threw the sack over the ornate teal stone, pulled a cord tight around the sack’s opening, and lifted it from its resting place without placing a single finger on it. “And look at everything I’ve gained.”
His sailors laughed with him. Camille spotted her straggly-beared attacker. A fist-sized bruise from Samuel’s boot discolored his jaw. Camille discreetly scanned the cascade, but didn’t see Ira or Samuel. She returned her stare to McGreenery; only this time, it was she who smiled.
“I remember what you said. But I have the real map, don’t I?” She held it up for him to see as the second wave of sparks, invisible to everyone else, rolled back over the map and erased the riddle. “Samuel copied the diagram for you, but there were things the map wouldn’t show him. Things only the one worthy of the stone could see. And he overlooked something else, something he had no reason to believe was important.”
McGreenery came around the shrine, the sack’s cord cutting so deeply into his flesh, the skin whitened. Camille twirled the map around to show the glowing mark.
“This is the mark of Umandu.” She stepped aside so he could see the amber stone aglow at her heel. Shock drowned McGreenery’s simper. “And you can go to hell.”
― Angie Frazier, quote from Everlasting
“It's not true that you were the good child. Not a good child at all. You were scared of rejection, so you made yourself a convenient child for your parents to have around."
"And your good parents - well, that is a lie as well. Not good parents at all, always looking over their shoulders, afraid of what people might be saying behind their backs. You think that liars who flock together never betray each other? Oh, you will betray your parents. And your parents will betray you. It is the way of all flesh. We tell each other our lies and the betrayed betrays the betrayer.”
― Fuyumi Ono, quote from The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow
“si se para uno a pensarlo, todo es bello en este mundo, salvo lo que nosotros mismos discurrimos y hacemos cuando olvidamos los fines supremos de la existencia y nuestra dignidad humana.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti
“the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole and with a terrific crash, that sounded and resounded for miles and miles of flei, Will fell into the long grass.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage
Obsidian
The Daylight War
Salvation
The Wolf and the Dov...
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