115 Quotes by Alice McDermott

It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.

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.

There was tremendous affection in Billy’s eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most.

There was... her capacity to believe. There was as well her capacity to be deceived, since you can’t have one without the other...

It had been raining, that gray, unpoetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb.

For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain – this is how we saw the world – there would never again be loneliness in life.

She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue.