David James Duncan Quotes

Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure.

My life is an open pamphlet.

I'm very open with my life, and I don't regret it because it's what got me here.

You think you're being broken but you're really being broken open...and that's where the healing happens, in those broken places...if you'll allow it.

I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Take off your armor; dare to be vulnerable, dare to unwrap yourself, and dare yourself to be yourself.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

The hardest thing to remember is that what we each really want is the truth of our lives, good or bad. Not rocking the boat is an illusion that can only be maintained by the unspoken agreement not to feel and in the long run it never really works. Let go of saving the boat and save the passengers instead.

OK, so truth hurts - but what else does truth do?

There is a difference between vulnerability and telling people everything about yourself. Vulnerability is a feeling. Telling everyone about yourself is just facts and details.

I want to be affirmatively proud of what I have made my way through. And to do that, in the same way I had to tell my father and my family and my friends that I was gay, I need to not hide this anymore.

I'm more comfortable revealing myself than hiding behind metaphors. I respond to artists who reveal something of themselves.

You know the expression, 'You're only as sick as your secrets?' I believe that, and I think I try to have my work live by that to a degree.

I personally have a philosophy around authenticity and vulnerability.

I think I'm a pretty open book. We're all a work in progress, and I'm not ashamed to say that I don't have it all together - I don't really think anyone does.

I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it.

I just feel compelled to continue to be transparent. It just really levels the playing field and eradicates the shame that I have, or that one might have, about being human. So I'm going to just keep going.

I'm not afraid to be bluntly honest in my songs, even if it means I'm discovering things about myself that I'd rather not.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

Some people would rather have a lie that makes them smile than a truth that makes them cry. I'm the opposite; I'd rather have people make me cry with the truth than try to make me smile.

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.

You must take the risk to disclose yourself in order to become more real, more human. And even if the price is high.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone's eyes.

Some people are attracted to vulnerability. From my very first album, I've been vulnerable. I've always given parts of me, parts of my life - good, bad, ugly. I've never put up this image as a super-thug. Also, some people just like the music.