Andre Dubus III > Quotes

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“For our excess we lost everything.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside... but now the sky is the color of peaches...

It was a ball of bright saffron sinking into the sea, turning the water purple, the sky orange and green.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“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

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“One of the things I tell the writers with whom I work is, man, when you finish a draft of a poem, or short story or novel, you make sure you go out and celebrate all night long because whether the world ever notices or not, whether you get it published or not, you did something most people never do: You started, stuck with, and finished a creative work. And that is a triumph. That is something to celebrate. All the stuff that I'm talking about is really from the point of view of trying to create art—and I don't mean to sound highfalutin when I bring the word "art" in. All I mean is, a work that seeks to illuminate truth in whatever way possible.”
― Andre Dubus III

“If there is no snake at your feet, do not lift rocks at the side of the road.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“...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, Townie

“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

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”
― Andre Dubus III

“You've got to kill your darlings.”
― Andre Dubus III

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“...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, Dirty Love

“If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author—you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care—easier said than done. Accept that the world may never notice this thing you worked so hard at. And instead, do it for it, find a job, find a way of living that gives you an hour or two or three a day to do it, and then work your ass off sending out, trying to get out there, but do not put the pressure on the work to do something for you. Because then you’re going to be writing dishonestly and for the market instead of for the characters and your story.”
― Andre Dubus III

“Regret was Fear’s big sister,”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“Then she turned on him in a hundred small ways, each of them minor and not unusual when one human being lived with another, but this was like saying that a typhoon was nothing more than single drops of rain pushed by a little wind.”
― Andre Dubus III, Dirty Love

“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, House of Sand and Fog

“When I thought of the word "man," I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved.”
― Andre Dubus III

“But I'd run two miles and when I stepped inside our cool, dark house, I yelled up the stairs to Mom, "I ran two miles with Daddy, Mom! I'm strong! I'm strong!" And I punched the wall and could feel the plaster and lath behind the wallpaper, though I had no words for them.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“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, Dirty Love

“But even in September, Thursday was a big money night, seven to eight hundred take-home, and that's what April concentrated on as she drove, Franny's chin starting to loll against her chest—April made herself think of that fat roll of tens and twenties she'd have at closing, how she'd fold it into the front pocket of her jeans then go to the house mom's office off the dressing room and give Tina a hundred before she found Franny in her pj's on Tina's brown vinyl couch, and she'd try not to think of the walls above Tina's desk covered with dancers' schedules and audition Polaroids of naked women, some of them under postcards from girls who came and went.”
― Andre Dubus III, The Garden of Last Days

“It’s easy K. on one side of the page you got your costs and on the other side your benefits. All you do is mark which one is which, then you weigh one side against the other and you get your decision just like that. that’s all you ever have to do. i live by this.”

"But what if you don’t know the difference between a benefit and a cost? what if you’ve never been very good at telling a plus from a minus?”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“Coming?" Dennis held his arm out for her, a patient smile in his voice. She peered up at him, but he was just a tall, blurry shadow. There was talk and laughter and music coming from inside the house. Above it the stars were in a black sky. That black, black sky.
"You all right?"
All those stars so far apart. None of them close. From far away they just looked it.”
― Andre Dubus III, Dirty Love

“if there is no feet at your feet, do not lift rocks at the side of the road.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“I feel so much I hardly feel anything at all.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“Pop," I said, "isn't this shit vaulable?"
"Not to me, son.”
― Andre Dubus III