Quotes from Alice McDermott

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!

It's sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.

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

But love's a tonic, Michael, not a cure. He was a bastard still.

His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were--one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon, one more.

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.

It was as if he stopped time for them two weeks out of every year, cut them off from both the past and the future so that they had only this present in a brand-new place, this present in which her children sought the sight and the scent of her: a wonderful thing, when you noticed it. When the past and the future grew still enough to let you notice it. He did that for her. This man she'd married.

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

There was... her capacity to believe. There was as well her capacity to be deceived, since you can't have one without the other...

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.

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 our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with relatives.

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

She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue.

Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.

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.

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.

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.

You're a human being, and every time a list of prize nominations comes out and your name isn't on it, you do have that thumb-in-the-eye feeling.

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.

A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.

History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed

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

so your husband's home with the little ones?—it'll be good for him, let him see what it's like with kids all day, right? men never understand until you ask them to do it and then they say, Well, the kids only act like this with me, it has to be much easier when you're with them, isn't that the truth? They're really thinking, You can't possibly put up with this day after day, can you?

It had been raining, that gray, unpoetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb.