Trigger Warning

Andrew Dubus, an American short story writer, died on this day in 1999. Honour his life by writing a short story for submission.

Awards

  • L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
  • Separate Flights
  • The PEN/Malamud Award [Rea Award for the Short Story] for excellence in short fiction
  • The Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • The Lawrence L. Winship Award
  • Fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations

Quotes

  • He learned how quickly love died when you weren’t looking; if you weren’t looking.
  • What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
  • 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’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.
  • I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.
  • Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
  • It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
  • 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.
  • So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half pleasures which are not whole because they are not shared. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

Learn more about the life of Andre Dubus.

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