Alice McDermott Quotes
Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.
Quotes to Explore
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I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.
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Yes, because when you're in love, you are shy.
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During the 2008 election, I made clear to the Obama campaign that I don't think it's wise for me to force my personal political agenda on anyone.
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By nature, I'm a very positive person, and because I'm happy in myself, and in my life, and I've got a great husband, and beautiful children, and I have a job that I love that calls for a certain amount of emotional expression, I get to realise a lot of my dreams and aspirations.
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We are paying the price for living longer, collecting degenerative diseases along the way. Cancer is only one. Others are heart and brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinsons.
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I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.
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You gotta understand, you can't look at no pictures and look at the media and the critics and what they saying on no Internet.
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The work environment on 'Battlestar Galactica' is unbelievable, and it's something that doesn't come along very often.
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A lot of people go in and have to create their own characters, and they do fine with it.
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I realized that I'm a soft person. I think I'm sensitive. I wanted very much to be tough and I think movie stars have a certain kind of resilience and toughness to them, but I'm quite a sensitive young lady in some respects.
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I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.
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Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.
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There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
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I've never been on a date.
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Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.
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The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
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A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
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How dull it is to have people defining you.
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If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
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I guess what bothers me so much about what I now see going on in both Washington and in Texas is an effort to keep people from finding out about the mistakes of lawmakers and then when they're uncovered, an effort to fool people and pretend there was nothing wrong.
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I think the first thing is don't give up. If you love the craft. If you love being a detective and discovering who a character is and the detail of how they walk and what kind of shoes they wear and what did they do yesterday and what's important to them. I definitely advise actors to learn about the craft.
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One cannot, without reflection, make some into bearers of goodness and others into miscreants, judging them by relative positive or negative criteria. These, like everything else, change according to historical circumstances, the character of a society, the time and subjective points of view.
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Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.
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Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.
