Absolution Quotes

“There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“INCONSEQUENTIAL GOOD, you said, describing your mother’s life, all her little efforts. A phrase less pertinent, less painful, to us, I think, since neither one of us, as far as I can tell, has claimed any gift for altruism, no outsized generosity, no impulse to shout back at the gobbling whirlwind—no furious ambition, for that matter, to do more than is reasonable about the chaos in the world. The awfulness. We hoped only, I think, you and I, to stay safe: to close as tightly as we could the circle of our affection—blood-deep, insistent affection for our own, for the few we could bear to love.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Tricia thought bringing such gifts to these poor people, the lepers, would be the clearest indication we could give them that they, too, were beautiful in spite of their disease. Still beautiful. Still human. And we will not look away.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“It’s just that you said there’s very little good we can do. In this place. And I agree, I do. But that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil—that impulse to turn away.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“ISN’T IT AWFUL, really, how days and dates disappear, how the bright routines that absorb our attention for so many hours of the living day fall away so easily over the years, obscure and confound memory’s precision. Was that last Monday or last Tuesday? Last month, the month before? Sometime last year? Some season of my childhood?”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“in Harlem, but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband. That was the word I used. It was, in fact, the word my own father had used, taking both my gloved hands in his as we waited for the wedding guests to file into our church in Yonkers. This was in the bride’s waiting room, a small chamber well off the vestibule. I recall a tiny stained-glass window, a kneeling bench (for last-minute prayer, I suppose), a box of tissues (for last-minute tears) on a shelf under an ornate mirror, and the two brocade chairs where we sat. The cool odor of old stone and the fresh flowers in my bouquet. My father took both my hands and held them together on the wide tulle skirt of my wedding dress, which even in the dim light of the tiny room was winking with seed pearls. He said, “Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown.” I said, “I will.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run. You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home. Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I’d be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself. And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful. It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We’d only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed. I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I’d taught kindergarten at a parish school”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my afternoon nap, damp hair on my neck as I removed the shower cap, a haze of talcum. Still wrapped in the towel, I could feel the perspiration prick my skin. Face powder, rouge, lipstick. And then the high-waisted cotton underpants (I hope you’re laughing), the formidable cotton bra, the panty girdle with the shining diamond of brighter elastic at its center. The click of the garters. Stockings slipped over the hand and held up to the light, reinforced toe and heel and top.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“THERE WERE SO MANY COCKTAIL PARTIES in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless. You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives. Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading, writing letters home—those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds; evidence, I think now, of how exotic distance itself once seemed. I’d do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging—wedding stationery with my still-new initials, real ink, and cunning turns of phrase, bits of French, exclamation marks galore. The fan moving overhead and the heat encroaching even through the slatted blinds of the shaded room, the spice of sandalwood from the joss stick on the dresser.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“We women would have to go to work. Our children, even our infants and newborns, dropped off every morning at some massive brick or concrete government institution.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“As you say, no such thing as a life without regret. Maybe because we fortunates have far too many options.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Small world, right? Although in truth it seems to me that it's not the world that's small, only our time in it.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“and”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“The process—the privilege of a long life—fills you with the lingering sense of uncertainty. Why did I buy this in the first place? Who gave it to me, anyway? What am I keeping it for?”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“We are,” Charlene said, utterly patient. “It’s just that you said there’s very little good we can do. In this place. And I agree, I do. But that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil—that impulse to turn away.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Pero también dan cobijo a los chicos de los pueblos vecinos, los acogen y dicen que son leprosos, para evitar que los secuestren los del Viet Cong en sus incursiones.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolución

“I had nightmares about this: standing alone in the midst of a happy crowd of elegant and worldly-wise Westerners, my voice paralyzed, my mouth benumbed, my teeth sealed. Humiliated. Inconsequential”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Poetry, he said, is in the world well before a poet finds it.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“whenever anyone asked if she was a Democrat or a Republican, she said neither. She was irritated.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“The dull reverberation of what I, too, had felt that night: a disturbance worse than fear—colder, more penetrating than fear. An understanding, perhaps, of what a paltry, personal matter it is to lose your life.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“some remnant of that impulse your husband’s generation was so steeped in. An instinctive response to a woman’s, any woman’s, appearance, anywhere. All rise.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“that he had no sense that he was watching himself, admiring himself, as he went about being a good and generous guy—that kind of clawing self-consciousness that I’ve observed over the years in many an altruist: priests, missionaries, ACLU attorneys, the leaders of certain charities, or all the well-dressed elites at black-tie global fundraisers. Performative bonhomie. Self-congratulatory demonstrations of their limitless agape.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“How many words are there for joy? I’ve heard other mothers say it, you said it yourself: the world begun again, in beauty and innocence, in goodness and hope. And entirely in your care.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“pleasure of expectation?”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“Tikkun olam.” He smiled at us all. An ancient midrash, he explained. “Your Mr. Tannen would know it,” he told me. “It means ‘repair the world.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“caught”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“He spoke in a rush. 'A pediatric cardiac surgeon working gratis on an abandoned premie with Down Syndrome as a third-rate hospital - so good that twenty years later other surgeons are saying: Wow.' He shook his head. 'How's that for believing in a benevolent universe?”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution

“I offered God everything. If there's a spiritual equivalent to an eternal blow job, I offered it.”
― Alice McDermott, Absolution