Andre Dubus Quotes

“I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.”

— Andre Dubus

“Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.”

— Andre Dubus

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.

— Andre Dubus

“A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

— Andre Dubus

“What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or - and he wished this - did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?”

— Andre Dubus

“Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.”

— Andre Dubus

He learned how quickly love died when you weren't looking; if you weren't looking.

— Andre Dubus

“What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?”

— Andre Dubus

“We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

— Andre Dubus

“The office was large, with many women and men at desks, and she learned their names, and presented to them an amiability she assumed upon entering the building. Often she felt that her smiles, and her feigned interest in people's anecdotes about commuting and complaints about colds, were an implicit and draining part of her job. A decade later she would know that spending time with people and being unable either to speak from her heart or to listen with it was an imperceptible bleeding of her spirit.”

— Andre Dubus

“Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you'll see in your arms is yourself.”

— Andre Dubus

Its sound in her soul was a distant fast train. Love did not bring happiness, it did not last, and it ended in pain. She did not want to believe this, and she was not certain that she did; perhaps she feared it was true in her own life, and her fear had become a feeling that tasted like disbelief.

— Andre Dubus

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

— Andre Dubus

There's something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot ... It's significant ... Because somebody has to take them in ... And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world ... You move out of your isolation and become universal.

— Andre Dubus

“There were three of these women, separated by short intervals of pain, remorse, and despair. When he and the last one had their final quarrel - she threw the breadboard - he was nearly fifty-five, and he gave up on love, save the memory of it. Always his aim had been marriage. He had never entered what he considered to be an affair, something whose end was an understood condition of its beginning. But he had loved and wanted for the rest of his life women who took him in their arms, and even their hearts, but did not plan to keep him. He had known that about them, they had told him no lies about what they wanted, and he had persisted, keeping his faith: if he could not change their hearts, then love itself would.”

— Andre Dubus

We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got.

— Andre Dubus

“When Jennifer was here in the summer, they were at the house most days. I would say generally that as they got older they became quieter, and though I enjoyed both, I sometimes missed the giggles and shouts. The quiet voices, just low enough for me not to hear from wherever I was, rising and failing in proportion to my distance from them, frightened me. Not that I believed they were planning or recounting anything really wicked, but there was a female seriousness about them, and it was secretive, and of course I thought: love, sex. But it was more than that: it was womanhood they were entering, the deep forest of it, and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little difference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about in it like birds. So hearing Jennifer and her friends talking so quietly, yet intensely, I wanted very much to have a wife.”

— Andre Dubus

“No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.”

— Andre Dubus

“He had made his cowardice urbane, mobile, and sophisticated; but perhaps at its essence cowardice knows it is apparent: he believed David and Kathi knew that their afternoons at the aquarium, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Science Museum, were houses Peter had built, where they could be together as they were before, with one difference: there was always entertainment.”

— Andre Dubus

“Can't make marriage the be-all and end-all. Because if you do it won't work. Listen: from the looks of things we've got one of the few solid marriages around. But it took work, pussycat. Work.' Her eyes gleamed with the victory of that work, the necessity for it.”

— Andre Dubus

“I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O'Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built.”

— Andre Dubus

“I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body. What we need is not the sound of horns rising to the sky, but the steady beat of the bass drum. When you march to a bass drum, your left foot touches the earth with each beat, and you can feel the drum in your body: boom and boom and boom and pity people pity people pity people.”

— Andre Dubus

“I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.”

— Andre Dubus

“Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.”

— Andre Dubus

“I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go”

— Andre Dubus

As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.

— Andre Dubus

“What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.”

— Andre Dubus

“For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.”

— Andre Dubus

“We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.”

— Andre Dubus

“I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.”

— Andre Dubus

“I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.”

— Andre Dubus

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.

— Andre Dubus

“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.”

— Andre Dubus

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

— Andre Dubus

“My belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.”

— Andre Dubus

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.

— Andre Dubus

“That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.”

— Andre Dubus

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

— Andre Dubus

Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.

— Andre Dubus

“I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.”

— Andre Dubus

“Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.”

— Andre Dubus

“I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.”

— Andre Dubus

“For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”

— Andre Dubus

“People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.”

— Andre Dubus

“My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.”

— Andre Dubus

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.

— Andre Dubus

“Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.”

— Andre Dubus

“I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.”

— Andre Dubus