David James Duncan’s “The Brothers K” Quotes (19 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

    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, carcinogenic beer, and the trenches in World War I.




    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.


    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.

    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.


    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.


    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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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