Andre Dubus III Quotes

‎Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces & giving up your soul

Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music. If you can live it, there's no problem about the music, because it's part of the whole thing.

We must be able to appreciate and enjoy the places where we tarry and yet pass on without anguish when we are called elsewhere. In our spiritual development we are often required to pull up roots many times and to close many chapters in our lives until we are no longer attached to any material thing and can love all people without any attachment to them.

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

I believe in spirit and then I believe a manifestation of spirit is dance

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

Devotion is not a concept, not a certain kind of ideology, not a certain kind of act, it is the agent of dissolution.

We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.

RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.

To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.

I’ve got to push everything out of mind save the name of Jesus. I say His name over and over again, for as long as fifteen minutes, until I find my soul suspended in what the ancient Celtic Christians called a “thin place”–a state where the boundary between heaven and earth, divine and human, dissolves. You could say that I use the name of Jesus as my koan.

Religion is organized, and spirituality is what the individual feels in his relationship with truth and with God. And although spirituality may be expressed in a religion, many people are spiritual and never go to church. They aren't religious in the sense that they practice a certain type of discipline.

You impose limits on your true nature of infinite being. Then you get displeased to be only a limited creature. Then you begin spiritual practices to transcend these non-existing limits. But if your practice itself implies the existence of these limits, how could they allow you to transcend them.

When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

To me, I like and understand ritual and I think it is important. Things that we do that give us comfort are important. Like Christmas, I like to go into a church and hear the carols sung. There's a comfort of actually going inside of a church, I find them serene. They're unchanging.

Creativity is God's will for us and should be practiced like any other spiritual practice -a day at a time.

When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.

Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church.

Dance is the purest expression of every emotion, earthly and spiritual

I prayed to dispel my fear, until suddenly, and I do not know how the idea came to me, I began to pray for others. I prayed for everyone who came into my thoughts - - people with whom I had traveled, those who had been in prison with me, my school friends of years ago. I do not know how long I continued my prayer, but this I do know - - my fear was gone! Interceding for others had released me!