Alice McDermott famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents', my brother's, even Tom's, had failed to do. Love was required of me now--to be given, not merely to be sought and returned.
-- Alice McDermott

#Brother #Children #Parent
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

#Writing #Order #Needs
The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
-- Alice McDermott

#Writing #Stories
Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.
-- Alice McDermott

#Guilt #Wells #Glorious
A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
-- Alice McDermott

#Book #Writing #Humility
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

#World #Language #Vulgar
We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit--the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.
-- Alice McDermott

#Laughter #Silly #Names
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

#Sea #Way #Mercy
The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.
-- Alice McDermott

#Memories #Echoes #Gone
A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
-- Alice McDermott

#Sooner Or Later

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