Alice McDermott Quotes
Top 62 wise famous quotes and sayings by Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Alice McDermott on Wise Famous Quotes.
Thousands more were being born today, being conceived - women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
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!
Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
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.
He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life.
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.
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
IN THE LOBBY of her building, people fresh out of the wind were huffing and puffing like swimmers just crawled up on shore. She
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
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.
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.
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity ... my children aren't buying it.
It's sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.
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.
The day and time itself: late afternoon in early February, was there a moment of the year better suited for despair?
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.
In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
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
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.
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.
Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.
It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her ...
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.
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
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
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.
I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.
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.
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.
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.
I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.