Quote

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

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Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Became
Sweet
Anyone
Brutalized
Natural
Frankly
Kids
Brutal
Always
Makeup
Think
Sensitive
Thinking
Violent

More quotes by Andre Dubus

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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
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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
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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
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I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
Andre Dubus
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
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I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.
Andre Dubus
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Fear is a ghost embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
Andre Dubus
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I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.
Andre Dubus
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My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special he's still one of my favorite writers.
Andre Dubus
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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
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I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
Andre Dubus
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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
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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