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Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.


Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott
Tags: Life  Reading  Place  Know  Wonder  Meet   

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Author introduction

Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award[1] and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[2]

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My children have gone to Catholic school... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Life Education Children School Value
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What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life's blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Life Love Time Heart Past Me
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For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Family People Immigrant First Exile
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I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Experience Literature You Find Human
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I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Trying Small Epic Ordinary Something
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I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity... my children aren't buying it.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Children I Am Cell Phone Trying
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I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Me Long Place Island Person Up
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Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.

    Alice McDermott  Alice McDermott   
 Tags: Life Reading Place Know Wonder Meet
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