David James Duncan Quotes

At which point should we let go and do what we want to do, and when should we submit to rules? Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it fascinates me.

I needed freedom to really express myself. That's really what Justified is about.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

Nothing I do is thought out or planned or premeditated. It's just that I'm breathing and living! You just have to breathe and live.

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

I can't just pretend to be someone else all my life. I have to mix it up.

I'm not being asked to conform to some prior expectation of what a Congress member is, but I'm just getting to be me.

When I perform, I'm just very much just being myself.

I love to go on road trips. That's one thing I love about being in L.A. and having a car. In New York, you can get around on the subway but you can't really go anywhere. But there's a danger in believing that where you are defines you.

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves.

Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise.

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, 'Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.' Nobody ever tells you, 'Just be yourself' - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.

I've always like the time before dawn because there's no one around to remind me who I'm supposed to be, so it's easier to remember who I am.

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.