47 Quotes by David James Duncan

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.

--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.

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.

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.

I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I 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 unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead.

We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence.

The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.

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.

Ecosystems are holy. The word “environmental” is a deadly compromise itself. It’s a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.