Andre Dubus

Short story writer

1936-08-11 – 1999-02-24

American short-story writer and novelist known for emotionally precise depictions of ordinary lives under moral strain. His major collections include Separate Flights and Adultery and Other Choices, and his work influenced a generation of contemporary fiction writers.

Quotes by Andre Dubus

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
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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?
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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.
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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?
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What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
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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.
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I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.
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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.
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I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
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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.
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Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.
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Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
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