Quotes from Alice McDermott

I'm sorry this happened to you, Marie,' he said wearily. 'There's a lot of cruelty in the world.' And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. 'You'll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.

She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.

The devil loves these short, dark days.

He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life.

The owner's wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There's always someone nice.

As if only he and the blind man could see what the rest of them could not.

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.

THAT EVENING, just after midnight, John Keane was drawn downstairs by a pounding at his door that might have been theatrical, something falsely urgent and echoing about it.

Tom placed his beer on the glass-topped garden table. Were I to dream again, I would dream myself into this room, at this hour. I would take the fading cushion beside him.

In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, "A fool. It means someone's a fool." Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father's shout of laughter when my brother asked him, "Who is?

Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.

And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father's neck. "There went the tree," he said.

itself, had emerged from that shadow.

WHEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said "during the war," their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man's beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man's last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child's.

He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one. With her arms around her

With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves

Shoot him in the foot," Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. "Break his legs before you let him go.")

The banging at the door was his excuse to turn away—some people had their coats in there—and while he stood with his back to her she dressed again and unlocked the door and walked out. She smiled at the taunts and jeers of her friends and when someone asked, "Where's Mike?" she said, "I think I killed him," which got a great laugh.

He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. "'Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?'" he read. "'Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only silence now, in the small living room. There

IN THE LOBBY of her building, people fresh out of the wind were huffing and puffing like swimmers just crawled up on shore. She