After This Quotes

“It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with relatives.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were--one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon, one more.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“It benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion—what a mess it had made—restored order, made things right for the homecoming.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“My wife always knows exactly,” he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then turned to say, “I got two kids born in”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason’s taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God’s bustling. There”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Thousands more were being born today, being conceived—women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came (would it ever come?), the baby would most likely not survive, would”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Mr. Persichetti called his patients God’s mistakes. He pressed”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“The servants were evil,” he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurses’ station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. “They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do.” (“If you get my meaning,” the priest had said.) “But Dymphna ran off to Belgium.” He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. “Her crazy father followed her,” he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. “I guess he cut off her head.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He’d had the story from an Irish priest assigned to Creedmoor. “A sad case himself,” Mr. Persichetti said, and gently pulled the damp hem of her dress back over her thighs. For a moment he found himself incapable of remembering Mr. Keane’s face, although they’d been neighbors for perhaps ten years. Nor could he remember another conversation he’d had with this woman stretched before him now on her living-room couch, her hair damp and her eyes a kind of gray, or green. He took her hand as if she were his child, or his own wife. “Apparently,” he said, “this Saint Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish chieftain, a pagan. But she had a beautiful Christian mother.” Gray eyes or green, he thought they were the one thing that might have made her pretty when she was young. “So the mother dies.” He paused only briefly. “When the girl’s about fourteen. And the chieftain goes crazy and tells his servants to go out and find another beautiful woman who resembled his dead wife so he can marry her.” He paused again to touch her”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He’d had the”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness, and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away, his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale legs bare, and he asked, gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded and when the contraction had passed, added, “Modesty is always the first thing to go.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery string and even—she might have planned this—a turkey baster, all of which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the housekeeper his own wife was—there were crumbs on the kitchen table and stained teacups in the sink—but there was a sweetness in the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold of his arm.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“It was simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators, complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus. You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it cold?—because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back. Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.” He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she drew her legs up against the pain. He”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call “Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only silence now, in the small living room. There”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully—a reluctant skater on a pond—got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen of them—it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that she should have been counting them off on her fingers—when the first cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable. Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel, or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the rise and fall of the wind outside. Long”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“(“Shoot him in the foot,” Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. “Break his legs before you let him go.”)”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one. With her arms around her”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child’s.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Jake. From Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob. Michael turned to his brother whose eyes”
― Alice McDermott, After This