Top 38 Andre Dubus III Quotes
#1. Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)
Andre Dubus III
#2. The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus III
#3. Sometimes in this life, only one or two opportunities are put before us and we must seize them no matter the risk.
Andre Dubus III
#4. Pop," I said, "isn't this shit vaulable?"
"Not to me, son.
Andre Dubus III
#6. One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
Andre Dubus III
#7. Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.
Andre Dubus III
#8. I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
Andre Dubus III
#9. Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.
Andre Dubus III
#10. It seemed almost inconceivable that in his short marriage to Althea she had, in her quiet way, left him feeling not only worthy, but exceptional, a man not only capable of being a real poet, but a husband and father too.
Andre Dubus III
#11. Soraya-joon, I have done all that I could. Do not be sorry for us. Your mother and I await you upon your return. We love you more than we have loved life. After your dear brother name your first son. Live here if you like, but if you sell it take no less than one hundred thousand dollars. ~Bawbaw
Andre Dubus III
#12. Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Andre Dubus III
#13. Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
Andre Dubus III
#14. She was speaking again, her voice like the chirp of a bird who has flown into a black tunnel but does not yet know it.
Andre Dubus III
#15. I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.
Andre Dubus III
#16. Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
Andre Dubus III
#17. I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
Andre Dubus III
#18. And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.
Andre Dubus III
#21. One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre Dubus III
#22. This I know of life's difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.
Andre Dubus III
#23. I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
Andre Dubus III
#24. I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.
Andre Dubus III
#25. As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.
Andre Dubus III
#26. It's almost easier being down and alone than when you re up and no one s there to share the view with you
Andre Dubus III
#27. On my way out with the rest, I glanced back at Bowman. he was on this knees, his hair in his face, his nose and split lips dripping with blood. He was staring down at the floor like he'd been waiting for this and now it had finally happened; he look relieved.
Andre Dubus III
#28. I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.
Andre Dubus III
#29. Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don't write at all.
Andre Dubus III
#30. If there is no snake at your feet, do not lift rocks at the side of the road.
Andre Dubus III
#31. Beach houses along short sandy streets. He can feel her bare forarm brushing his, and it's strange she's being so quiet. He glances down at her and she smiles up at him as if, in his silence, he's been telling a long story and she is simply listening to it.
Andre Dubus III
#32. I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus III
#34. I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
Andre Dubus III
#35. There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.
Andre Dubus III
#36. My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
Andre Dubus III
#37. Lester wanted to rise up out of this like a cloud, to drift over the valley and shore to the Pacific, to dissolve into its huge green expanse like rain.
Andre Dubus III
#38. He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice
almost overexuberant
was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who's just been told she's not sick anymore.
Andre Dubus III
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