Someone Alice Mcdermott Quotes

#1. And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky's reflection.

Alice McDermott

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Alice McDermott

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. "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

#8. Mr. Persichetti called his patients God's mistakes. He pressed

Alice McDermott

#9. Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.

Alice McDermott

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience, something I can use to another end rather than something I'm trying to define because it's somehow fascinating to me in itself. It's more what the place can do for the larger goals I have for the work.

Alice McDermott

#14. 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

#15. It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her ...

Alice McDermott

#16. itself, had emerged from that shadow.

Alice McDermott

#17. dull - she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She

Alice McDermott

#18. In the dining room, my brother - the scholar - was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, "A fool. It means someone's a fool." Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father's shout of laughter when my brother asked him, "Who is?

Alice McDermott

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. There was tremendous affection in Billy's eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most

Alice McDermott

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The owner's wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There's always someone nice.

Alice McDermott

#36. Thousands more were being born today, being conceived - women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.

Alice McDermott

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.

Alice McDermott