Quotes from Alice McDermott

Il y avait derrière cette voix toute une histoire de nuits sombres, quelque chose d'exquis, quelque chose de dangereux.

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

Il y avait dans leur regard, ainsi que dans le geste de Mr. Carpenter, un air de propriétaire. Comme si, après s'être approprié les trottoirs et les rues, ils s'apprêtaient maintenant à s'approprier les enfants qui y jouaient.

The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children's voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call "Hello," the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It

Sorry," Mary said. "I had some errands to run." Pauline eyed her. It would be Pauline's way to say, No you didn't. It would be Pauline's way to refuse the decorum of the fib, to embrace the painful honesty. It would be her way to say, You just didn't feel like having lunch with me. Which would have been true, of course. And no less embarrassing, regrettable, awkward, no less vigorously denied, because it was true.

The madness with which suffering was dispersed in the world defied logic.

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

She paused, her eyes joyous, her lips pursed, her cheeks drawn in, as if the piece of news were butterscotch in her mouth. "Adele was crying," she added, only mouthing the words, or only speaking them with a breathless wheeze in place of where the words might have been. "Crying." She pantomimed, dragging her own manicured finger down her cheek.

What greater torment for a man whose sin was suicide than to be trapped forever in the body he'd sought to shed?

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

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time. Pauline's eyes

It would be a different Church if I were running it." And so lifted the burden of that terrible morning with some laughter.

Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they had abandoned.

The goal, Sister Clare had taught them in school, was shorthand so neat and so legible that anyone can pick up your steno book and type your letters for you. So neat and so legible, she had said, smiling at them from within her wimple, that if you elope on your lunch hour, another secretary can finish your letters for you that afternoon.

He was pale as salt. Although

This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter, Pauline's eyes still on her. She would like to ask "Who?"—but to do so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to enter too fully into Pauline's tale, Pauline's bitter triumph, and, in some way, into Pauline's unhappy life. But Mr. Who?

Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired

Le monde manifeste autant d'indifférence aux amoureux qu'aux pauvres et aux malchanceux.

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

He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hat against his overcoat were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin. The way a child's fingers might move in sleep.

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.

Being happy," Uncle Tommy liked to say, "takes a great deal of work." He said he had no time for anything else.

The wind," Mary said again. "It was making everyone tear up.

Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set. And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and slowly shaking her big head. "You are naïve," she said, as if confirming something she had already spent a good deal of time discussing, elsewhere. "You really are." Mary shrugged. "I suppose. But that wind was making everyone tear up.