Conversations with Andre Dubus

To experience a story like that, you can’t be looking for connections with Dante. You can’t be thinking. You have to be drawn into it. You have to come away from your story and say, “Boy, that story made me hungry. It was hot where I was. And it was isolated, and the wind blew on the prairie.” It’s not a cerebral thing, writing. It’s a very sensual, fleshy thing. Although our greatest thoughts appear in literature, they get there like everything— through the flesh. If you take that laughing, drinking, suffering, weeping Jesus out of Christianity, what have you got? Chinese fortune cookies. It’s true.

Conversations with Andre Dubus, edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield, University Press of Mississippi, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stthom/detail.action?docID=1113436.
Created from stthom on 2022-10-30 12:18:29.

I wasn’t struggling for her to know herself; I was struggling to know her. My emotions, fatherly, were, “If she only knew herself.” Things aren’t that bad. She didn’t have to end up being somebody who, instead of calling paramedics, would call her daddy while somebody who didn’t have to die bled to death. It’s funny I would end up getting run over by a woman who ran across the street and said, “I didn’t do it.” I didn’t ask for that either, thank you, God.

Conversations with Andre Dubus, edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield, University Press of Mississippi, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stthom/detail.action?docID=1113436.
Created from stthom on 2022-10-30 12:45:48.