Alice McDermott Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
-
If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.
-
We have shown that it is possible to create a radioactivity characterized by the emission of positive or negative electrons in boron and magnesium by bombardment with alpha rays.
-
It's always fun to immerse yourself in a different time period.
-
Adding 'just kidding' doesn't make it okay to insult the Principal.
-
Kids are taking music for free all the time. They have Spotify, Pandora... The record companies aren't making the kind of music that they used to make. Artists make their money on tours, not from album sales.
-
I've been too many places. I'm like the bad penny.
-
Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.
-
I can go to a country song, go right into it and make it sound authentic. And I think that's because of my ear as an impressionist.
-
We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.
-
I think success happens when it's supposed to and when you can appreciate it. I am grateful that it didn't happen for me at 22 or 23. I would've been foolish enough to think that we're all entitled to it, instead of it being the divine blessing that it is.
-
I'm not a Democrat.
-
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
-
It is a matter of simple fact that Icelanders have always been notoriously indolent.
-
The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.
-
They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
-
Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.
-
I try to stay consciously away from the roles of the girl who throws herself at the leading man, because I've done it a lot and I want to move on. I ticked that box.
-
If I sit down with an electric guitar, what's going to come out are Sabbath/Zeppelin type riffs, but if I'm sitting behind a piano late at night, I might write something like 'Desperado.' You're not going to write 'Desperado' between a wall of Marshalls and thumping, crushing volume.
-
Actually since the Convention I have gotten so many letters that I have tried to answer but every letter said they thought this decision, not to accept the compromise, was so important. There wasn't one letter I have gotten so far that said we should have accepted the compromise - not one.
-
You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.
-
I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
-
I've done a lot of costume dramas and things that are set in the past, and it's great to be able to have things that you can research and material that you can look at.
-
I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.
