Alice McDermott Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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.
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If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.
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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.
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It's always fun to immerse yourself in a different time period.
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Adding 'just kidding' doesn't make it okay to insult the Principal.
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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.
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I've been too many places. I'm like the bad penny.
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Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not a Democrat.
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If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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It is a matter of simple fact that Icelanders have always been notoriously indolent.
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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.
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They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
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Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.
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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.
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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.
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I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
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I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
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The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.
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When I was touring in Texas, that was before iPods and Spotify. Driving around through towns, I had to, out of necessity, scroll the radio. Whatever region of the country you are in, that's a great way to find out what they listen to. You find music wherever you are, and that becomes the soundtrack for whatever your road trip is.
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Some temptations are so great it takes great courage to yield to them.
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I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.
