The Ninth Hour Quotes

“Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“But love’s a tonic, Michael, not a cure. He was a bastard still.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“If we could live without suffering, we'd find no peace in heaven.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“Liz Tierney had nothing against the salvation of all men. She was as grateful for the fact of heaven as she was sure of her path toward it. She counted the Blessed Mother as first among her confidantes. She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church—the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation—ordered her disorderly children. But holiness bored her.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“The devil loves these short, dark days.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church—the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation—ordered her disorderly children.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“She was a Catholic woman who was more moved by the miraculous blood that colored the cheeks of her six children as they fidgeted in the pew than she was by any injunction from the pulpit regarding the watery stuff that flowed from His pierced side for the salvation of all men.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church--the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation--ordered her disorderly children.

But holiness bored her.

She liked chaos, busyness, bustling. She liked a household strewn with clothes and dust and magazines and books, jump ropes, baseball bats, milk bottles. She like the sight and smell of overflowing ashtrays, of a man who's had a few drinks, of tabletops crowded with cloudy glasses. She loved falling into an unmade bed at the end of the long day, falling in beside her snoring husband--with maybe a child or two snagged in the covers--and never reaching, because sleep overtook her, the part of the Hail Mary that said: Now and at the hour of our death.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“Hold it against the good I've done, she prayed. We'll sort it out when I see You.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“What greater torment for a man whose sin was suicide than to be trapped forever in the body he’d sought to shed?”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“Sister St. Saviour did, of course. But the woman, childless, stubborn, coming to the close of her life, had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps, mad for her own authority in all things—a trait Annie had come to love and admire—but mad nonetheless. Riding home from the cemetery, Sister St. Saviour had said, “It would be a different Church if I were running it.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“our mother recalled it. But the nun’s language in these matters—matters of the body, of the flesh, what went on between women and men—”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“All joy was thin ice to Sister Lucy.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“It would be a different Church if I were running it.” And so lifted the burden of that terrible morning with some laughter.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

“The madness with which suffering was dispersed in the world defied logic.”
― Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour