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cb21c1d
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At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing-- a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, a..
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realization
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David James Duncan |
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7332473
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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902180f
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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 ..
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David James Duncan |
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7358794
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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 th..
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David James Duncan |
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e0b7d51
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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."
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letting-go
forgiveness
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David James Duncan |
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87d1f4a
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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766671e
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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6cc9f9c
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I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.
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faith
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David James Duncan |
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6cc60a2
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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6129557
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The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the "sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew." I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being."
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spirituality
religion
religious-freedom
mysticism
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David James Duncan |
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c111598
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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9d4ae74
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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...
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David James Duncan |
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732ecdc
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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c259937
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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8b5acf3
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the thing i found offensive, the thing i hated about mohican-mountain-makers, gill-netters, poachers, whalehunters, strip-miners, herbicide-spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders or anyone who lusted after flesh, meat, mineral, tree, pelt and dollar - including, first and foremost, myself - was the smug ingratitude, the attitude that assumed the world and its creatures owed us everything we could catch, shoot, tear out, alter, plun..
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David James Duncan |
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96d2920
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There was an old Taoist who lived in a village in ancient China, named Master Hu. Hu loved God and God loved Hu, and whatever God did was fine with Hu, and whatever Hu did was fine with God. They were friends. They were such good friends that they kidded around. Hu would do stuff to God like call him "The Great Clod." That's how he kidded. That was fine with God. God would turn around and do stuff to Hu like give him warts on his face, wens..
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inspirational
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David James Duncan |
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6e7e5f9
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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c5cadb3
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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c9498f6
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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a69ea69
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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21adac3
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To every Armageddonist, every earth lover must keep saying with all the sincerity and affection we can muster, "May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me."
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nature
spirituality
religion
religious-freedom
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David James Duncan |
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e8dc72e
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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..
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David James Duncan |
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c797364
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Life is short. It's God's fault. Sorry.
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David James Duncan |
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eb8da21
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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 someda..
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David James Duncan |
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bfd39f7
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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d30a04b
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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c24d82f
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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."
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David James Duncan |
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8e5a153
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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..
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David James Duncan |
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8f15f5a
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It is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.
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David James Duncan |
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1ba066f
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More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less,
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David James Duncan |
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e8a91ac
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that was the thing about nature: make one lousy rule to describe it and it'll contradict you even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do it. and so what? if anybody grew wise enough to grasp the real immutable laws of nature, nature'd only rear back and strike 'em dead before they got anybody to understand them
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David James Duncan |
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5744c15
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There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot ..
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stories
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David James Duncan |
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fa4bfde
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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.
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individuality
independence
freedom
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David James Duncan |
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dd55fa2
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As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon "moral values." I hold the evangelical truth of our situation to be that contemporary politicized fundamentalists, including first and foremost those aimed at Empire and Armageddon, need us non-fundamentalists, mystics, ecosystem activists, unp..
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spirituality
religion
salvation
mystics
peace
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David James Duncan |
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8314b7c
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I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I'd realized I didn't have to become them.
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David James Duncan |
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826b799
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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a142012
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Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful... becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical... if your words or deeds harmonize ..
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nature
spirituality
religion
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David James Duncan |
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cc70df3
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the only unfailing guide I've ever found through the innumerable blind alleys of my life as a writer, man, husband, father, citizen, steward, or believer, is the love burning in my heart. for me, prayer is about one thing: making contact with that love. though it burns in there like a candle flame, hot, bright, beautiful, love's flame is so fragile... keeping one's love burning, and living in accord with that burning: this, to me, is prayer..
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prayer
spirituality
religion
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David James Duncan |
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2db90cc
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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825a57e
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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3939232
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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aaaac38
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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 w..
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humor
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David James Duncan |
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f4bbcc9
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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c8ebdf8
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Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise. --Antonio Porchia
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David James Duncan |