Andre Dubus

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. ("A Father's Story")

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.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Talent is cheap. What matters is discipline.

Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.

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?

Don__ quit. It__ very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it__ very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can__ get fired if you don__ write, and most of the time you don__ get rewarded if you do. But don__ quit.

There__ something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot_It__ significant_Because somebody has to take them in_And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world_You move out of your isolation and become universal.