“He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.” — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain - this is how we saw the world - there would… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the heels of a distant roll of thunder, and in the instant before… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“John Keane pressed his chest to the steering wheel as he put the key in the ignition, taking a deep breath as he did,… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“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… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
What makes a sentence, a phrase, a moment, or a scene delightful? Something about recognizing the truth in it, hearing the music in it,… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him,… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“There wasn’t a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
“Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came (would it… — Alice McDermott Copy Share Image
