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“The nurse -- square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm brown eyes -- advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the ends of her pale hair.

In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes -- brown not hazel -- on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

Annie took her friend's bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff, she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment -- trembling, looking ahead -- could be called courage. And wondered why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.”
― Alice McDermott

“(T)he book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain )despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a warm fire, a fine meal, love.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father's surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan's ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through.”
― Alice McDermott, After This

“He had been relfecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.

And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.”
― Carol Shields, Larry's Party