Top 100 Alice McDermott Quotes
#1. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's bustling. There
Alice McDermott
#2. It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other
Alice McDermott
#3. The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.
Alice McDermott
#4. He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life.
Alice McDermott
#5. My wife always knows exactly," he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. "But that's probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine's and my birthday, so it's not hard to figure." He stepped out the door and then turned to say, "I got two kids born in
Alice McDermott
#6. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.
Alice McDermott
#7. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
Alice McDermott
#8. I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.
Alice McDermott
#9. I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
Alice McDermott
#10. After a long run of almost thirty years, you get to the point where you say, 'These are my concerns.' It's not so much this is what I set out to claim - it is a kind of refrain.
Alice McDermott
#11. It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.
Alice McDermott
#12. Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.
Alice McDermott
#13. In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have ... But I never did write a play.
Alice McDermott
#14. Thousands more were being born today, being conceived - women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.
Alice McDermott
#15. Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.
Alice McDermott
#16. The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Alice McDermott
#17. For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution.
Alice McDermott
#18. I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.
Alice McDermott
#19. I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.
Alice McDermott
#20. In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
Alice McDermott
#21. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.
Alice McDermott
#22. My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
Alice McDermott
#23. Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even
Alice McDermott
#24. "Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.
Alice McDermott
#25. Mr. Persichetti called his patients God's mistakes. He pressed
Alice McDermott
#26. I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.
Alice McDermott
#27. And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky's reflection.
Alice McDermott
#28. I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
Alice McDermott
#29. No one looks at a baby and says, 'You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.' Something in us says: 'This is what I must do.'
Alice McDermott
#30. It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her ...
Alice McDermott
#33. I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me.
Alice McDermott
#34. I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.
Alice McDermott
#35. He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one. With her arms around her
Alice McDermott
#36. Jake. From Philadelphia." Then he shook everybody's hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob. Michael turned to his brother whose eyes
Alice McDermott
#37. Family dynamics are true over time, across generations and different cultures.
Alice McDermott
#38. The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
Alice McDermott
#39. I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
Alice McDermott
#40. The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
Alice McDermott
#41. At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
Alice McDermott
#43. Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion - what a mess it had made - restored order, made things right for the homecoming.
Alice McDermott
#44. We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!
Alice McDermott
#45. Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came (would it ever come?), the baby would most likely not survive, would
Alice McDermott
#46. My children have gone to Catholic school ... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.
Alice McDermott
#47. A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
Alice McDermott
#48. When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
Alice McDermott
#49. What is wrong with you?" their father was saying. "Why can't you behave?" Michael - it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind - looked up to say, "Just playing. I was just playing." But
Alice McDermott
#50. Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise.
Alice McDermott
#51. I wouldn't want to tweet to anyone who would be interested in my tweets.
Alice McDermott
#52. I'm sorry this happened to you, Marie,' he said wearily. 'There's a lot of cruelty in the world.' And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. 'You'll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.
Alice McDermott
#53. I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
Alice McDermott
#54. Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
Alice McDermott
#55. like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.
Alice McDermott
#57. I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.
Alice McDermott
#58. As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw.
Alice McDermott
#59. I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity ... my children aren't buying it.
Alice McDermott
#60. It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.
Alice McDermott
#62. I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
Alice McDermott
#63. I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
Alice McDermott
#64. She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take
Alice McDermott
#65. It was already there," he said. "Someone left it behind. They didn't want it. The super said they couldn't even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway." "Lucky that you play," she said. She
Alice McDermott
#66. IN THE LOBBY of her building, people fresh out of the wind were huffing and puffing like swimmers just crawled up on shore. She
Alice McDermott
#67. I think it's handy for a dramatist of any sort, if I can call myself that, to make use of weddings and wakes, to make use of those moments and those rituals that cause us to pause and look back or look forward and understand that life has changed.
Alice McDermott
#68. Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired
Alice McDermott
#69. Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.
Alice McDermott
#70. I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap.
Alice McDermott
#72. what? - the sky growing black, the wind moaning, the scrim of sand that blew across the empty lot forming itself into tooth and mouth and open jaw. "What are you afraid of?" More derisively than he'd meant it.
Alice McDermott
#73. It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable
Alice McDermott
#74. Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.
Alice McDermott
#75. His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend out first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with relatives.
Alice McDermott
#76. I love a well-plotted story. But I'm just not that kind of writer, and it's not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity.
Alice McDermott
#77. It's sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.
Alice McDermott
#78. I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.
Alice McDermott
#79. As if only he and the blind man could see what the rest of them could not.
Alice McDermott
#80. I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.
Alice McDermott
#81. All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.
Alice McDermott
#82. Throughout the typing pool all the girls began to do the same.
Alice McDermott
#83. Adele," she mouthed. Mary looked up, she couldn't help it, toward the desk where Adele sat, her back to them, her dirty blond hair draped perfectly over her lovely shoulders. "Rita," another girl from the office, "saw them both," Pauline whispered. "At lunch." She
Alice McDermott
#84. Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.
Alice McDermott
#85. Most of the characters I write with don't think an awful lot about their faith. They're not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.
Alice McDermott
#87. I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
Alice McDermott
#88. A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
Alice McDermott
#89. I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.
Alice McDermott
#90. Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.
Alice McDermott
#91. Maybe," she said to Pauline, not looking at her, just turning her head a bit to speak to her from across the aisle and over her shoulder. Not whispering either. "Maybe it was just the wind.
Alice McDermott
#92. ("Shoot him in the foot," Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. "Break his legs before you let him go.")
Alice McDermott
#94. My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
Alice McDermott
#95. The wind," Mary said again. "It was making everyone tear up.
Alice McDermott
#96. I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
Alice McDermott
#97. For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain - this is how we saw the world - there would never again be loneliness in life.
Alice McDermott
#98. And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the hat bent into the onslaught. She
Alice McDermott
#99. For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
Alice McDermott
#100. The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm.
Alice McDermott
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