Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Andre Dubus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1936
Born: August 11
Died: 1999
Died: February 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Lake Charles
Louisiana
Andre Jules Dubus II
Cannot
Secular
Men
Ritual
Love
Tied
Perform
Allows
Tongue
Dancing
Spiritual
Ceremony

More quotes by Andre Dubus

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.
Andre Dubus
Image
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
Andre Dubus
Image
Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
Andre Dubus
Image
Fear is a ghost embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Andre Dubus
Image
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
Image
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