Quotes from Alice McDermott

Amadan." I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother's startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. "Amadan." The

The story she then told was as all attempts at sympathy are: an effort to match in form and size and detail what another has known: to hold one experience next to another the way lovers and children match fingers and hands, as if these two, side by side, are linked by their likeness, are both identical and unique.

Billy had drunk himself to death. He had, at some point, ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great, deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room.

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to

Why not? Bread was what you wanted over the long haul, when you got right down to it. When you got right down to it, you wouldn't want a lifetime of cake.

saw the first fat flakes pass like small shadows across the office window and expressed her disapproval of nature itself with a loud clucking of the tongue. Impatiently

Throughout the typing pool all the girls began to do the same.

Sister St. Saviour did, of course. But the woman, childless, stubborn, coming to the close of her life, had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps, mad for her own authority in all things—a trait Annie had come to love and admire—but mad nonetheless. Riding home from the cemetery, Sister St. Saviour had said, "It would be a different Church if I were running it.

she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks—the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.

Hold it against the good I've done, she prayed. We'll sort it out when I see You.

bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping

bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists? The

The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and methodical. The march of time.

The cold wind made it difficult to breathe, as if it could snatch your next breath before you had time to swallow it, and

sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don't shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.

In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be content.

She had packed two china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from anything else. He

It was either God's reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was midtown

it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.

She could feel the crunch of city grit between her back teeth.

It was a balancing act, to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months, even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now. All around them

His eyes were teary from the wind, red-rimmed and bloodshot. His nose was running and there were tears on his windblown cheeks. She

And then the wind paused completely, as it will in April, a sudden silence and maybe even the hint of warmth from the sun, so