115 Quotes by Alice McDermott

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.

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.

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

If we could live without suffering, we’d find no peace in heaven.

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.

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

This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas – politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman’s simple heartache.

Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?

The devil loves these short, dark days.