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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I have to get three pages done every day, and there's usually a point about 150 pages in where everything falls apart, where all the plans are for naught. The book has become something else, and I have a nervous breakdown, and then I submit to what the book has become, and I keep going, and that's a terrible and then a great time.
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Never forget that what becomes timeless was once truly new.
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Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.
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In 1255, Louis IX of France presented an elephant to Henry III of England to add to the menagerie of exotic animals he kept in the Tower of London.
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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.
