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a97b5c2
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Peter didn't want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.
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David James Duncan |
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c004213
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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 utterl..
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David James Duncan |
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cb0ecf0
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Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?
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David James Duncan |
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4d57ae8
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If we can't be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein' a Buddhist.
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David James Duncan |
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c590907
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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."
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David James Duncan |
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12a09f2
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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01fce1a
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All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give.
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David James Duncan |
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6c61079
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When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.
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David James Duncan |
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cbc4fec
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Fiction writing feels more honest to me.
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David James Duncan |
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0efdfe8
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Like gamblers, baseball fans and television networks, fishermen are enamored of statistics. The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn't resist backing their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn tha..
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David James Duncan |
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3dbc988
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he and Cease were "united by karmic connections so essential to our mutual inner balance that the endless differences of our minds are a constant amusement to us both"
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David James Duncan |
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901b624
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There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.
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spirituality
normalcy
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David James Duncan |
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a38000a
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I'm back!" he told Life."
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David James Duncan |
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fadaa97
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Your strange!" she gushed. (She meant "You're," but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it "Your.")"
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David James Duncan |
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8bab168
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I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
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sacrifice
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David James Duncan |
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318bdc7
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It was so good to see him in there, yet so funny to find him so much like me, and so tiny. "Nice kingdom you got here," I added, laughing again. "But it didn't feel quite right without you. Or should I say, without me?"
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David James Duncan |
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dfa0bfe
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I said we aren't here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we're here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry up and get dead.
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David James Duncan |
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4696cff
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To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty.
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David James Duncan |
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1236576
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You, me, & your papa are 3 of the tiny percentage of souls on this miserable earth who've figured out that playing ball is the highest purpose God ever invented the human male body for.
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David James Duncan |
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b848d69
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Papa was no longer fixing a carburetor: he was setting up a greasy little Cuban missile base smack-dab in the middle of Mama's immaculate Washington, D.C. It was a flagrant act of war.
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David James Duncan |
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56d555d
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This man obviously contained some sort of catalytic converter that rendered the filth of his language as natural and inoffensive as dirt in a garden.
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David James Duncan |
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081ef43
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She might be all right, Freddy said. But she sure is dead.
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David James Duncan |
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1aba6b7
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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 a..
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war
vietnam
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David James Duncan |
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0bbf166
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Not a Saint!" Akasha proclaimed, in bricks. "This is the Tomb of God Incarnate!" "Always did figure that sucker was dead," muttered Waites."
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David James Duncan |
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4cbf00e
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Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogen..
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David James Duncan |
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0e104ab
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I simply knew, via song, sunlight, redwings and cottonwoods, that there was a world I was born to live in, that the men I was standing beside lived in another, and that as long as I remembered this their words would never hurt me again.
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David James Duncan |
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9c72ddd
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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"
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David James Duncan |
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1a7e33b
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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.
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saint
sinner
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David James Duncan |
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356face
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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d6eda83
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People who vote for candidates bought by private business interests are not politically free in any real sense.
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David James Duncan |
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7e0ca05
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Perhaps [God] resided only above England. Or perhaps He had retired and now lived quietly in some remote Condominium Galaxy where He enjoyed a game of intergalactic golf now and again, deftly driving, pitching and putting stars into eighteen black holes in space, loosing devils on us whenever He scored a bogey. Or perhaps He hid behind every tree, rock and bush, or was closer than my very breath. Whatever He did, however He did it, Whoever ..
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David James Duncan |
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12d1b40
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When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was an act exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting.
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David James Duncan |
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54e56c6
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an eye for an eye is smart, see, but love is dumb, lovers are fools.
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David James Duncan |
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71227dc
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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5ce5e24
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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.
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life
loaded-bases
pitcher
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David James Duncan |
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5788489
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When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly 'in the world' in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.
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sacrifice
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David James Duncan |
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4f7f845
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Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child. --Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers, trying to explain why he prefers younger ballplayers
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David James Duncan |
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f159880
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He's just like me,' I think, amazed despite the pain. 'He's just a grownup boy, stuck in a body, stuck in a life. And his life isn't working. It's not working at all. And he's got no father, his mother can't understand, he's go no one to help him fix it.' Feeling this, knowing it, I turn and try to hold my father, as he's so often held me. He makes a small rasping sound when my arms slide round him, then wraps me up, very gently, and holds ..
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David James Duncan |
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2191a82
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Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain. --overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School
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David James Duncan |
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f31dc04
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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.
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David James Duncan |
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0d3cb47
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him, trying to do the same.
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David James Duncan |
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a43dc19
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The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard: government by force of farce.
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David James Duncan |
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1a342fe
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Sister Durrel is so beautiful compared to everything else at Sabbath school it's like my eyeballs turn into compass needles, and she's North.
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David James Duncan |
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9f156cc
|
Because sometimes happy songs will make sad people miserable, because they feel guilty that they aren't happy, on top of the sadness. But a sad song talks to the part that hurts, says, Yeah I know, yeah it's bad, yeah it hurts: but I'm with you. I feel it too.
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David James Duncan |