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.

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...

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 hus...

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 f...

On the hottest days you could smell the wood from the lumberyard on the other side of Water Street, the piss and shit of the drunks in the weeds, the engine exhaust, the sweet lead of the paint flakin...

Regret was Fear’s big sister,

For our excess we lost everything.

I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the...

She tried to stand but he had her by the hair and with his other hand he was jerking back and forth on himself, and she couldn't breathe and then he let out a groan as warm spurts fell wetly across he...

Somehow she was becoming the kind of woman she didn’t like, somebody who felt one way but smiled it off in a mask of cheerfulness, the kind of woman who got very good at small talk.

The JD wasn't going down smooth at all. Not like good stuff should. Instead of a warm slow seeping, it seemed to be kicking its way down his throat. And the buzz felt wrong; it was coming too fast, af...

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...

But now his body feels like some dumb beast he merely exists inside, and every now and then it lets him know it needs to do something: To eat. To piss or shit. To move or just lie down and rest.