Townie Quotes

“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 knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“...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 for her. (215)”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“But I'd run two miles and when I stepped inside our cool, dark house, I yelled up the stairs to Mom, "I ran two miles with Daddy, Mom! I'm strong! I'm strong!" And I punched the wall and could feel the plaster and lath behind the wallpaper, though I had no words for them.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“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 window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator. I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“some lovely echo we all one day leave behind.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“as if all those punches and kicks had pushed you into a gray and treeless landscape where love and forgiveness were hard to find.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“This was true innocence”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“Innocence is asking why to brutality.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“But I didn’t want to die. I was thirty-one years old. I was in love with my wife. We wanted to make a family. We wanted all those things people want before they”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“How could a man aim his M-16 at a young mother and her three boys? What part of himself did he have to kill to kill them? How was it possible for a woman and her children to be gunned down while elsewhere”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“That’s what Texas did to me”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“and there was the dark”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“we’d forget that this was all just temporary and everyone was an actor in a play none of us had written.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“The days became again what they were”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“surprised to hear Mom’s voice downstairs. She and Bruce were talking in the front room. I dressed and walked to the first floor. The sun was out and shone through the window across the dusty rug. From Suzanne’s room I could hear Mick Jagger singing how beautiful Angie was. It sounded”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“so much to say there was nothing to say.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“I DID NOT LOOK into the mirror”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“the”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“Danny D.’s big brothers, Gary and Sean, would light firecrackers and toss them at us. They’d let us come to their room and listen to the Doors and watch them smoke dope. One rainy afternoon, Sean, who was big with dull brown eyes, tied me to a utility pole out back of the barn and stacked twigs at my feet. He covered them with gas from the lawn mower and tried to light me up. But the gas was mixed with oil, and his matches were damp from his pocket, and when he ran back into the house for more I wrenched my wrists from the rope and ran for home.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“was after midnight and it’d been a long, dangerous chase along the back roads and the police had radioed ahead for the drawbridge over the Merrimack to be raised. I don’t know what Gary was driving, but he must’ve thought it was light and fast because when he got to the bridge it was already rising past 40 degrees and he gave the engine all it had and flew up into the air, then down into the swirling black water where he drowned.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“He was long-limbed and yellow-toothed and at eleven years old said shit and fuck.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“How could art truly help people? Did it feed them? Clothe them? Keep them warm in the winter? Did it put a gun in their hands to fend off their oppressors?”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“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 flaking off our clapboards.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

“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 writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie