Michael Patrick MacDonald > Quotes

“I remember hating having to cross over the Broadway Bridge again, having to leave the peninsula neighborhood and go back to my apartment in downtown Boston.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“I stared at them for a good long time, wondering if they didn’t know how to use their wings, of if they just didn’t know they had them, until it was too late to save themselves.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald

“When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chest, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn't have, especially the part about the land of the free.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“But the general feeling in the neighborhood was that school was for suckers. The dropouts were the ones who said that the most, and of course they usually looked as if they were having the most fun, wearing the best clothes, and making the most loot from drugs and petty scams. Ma said Kathy was starting to get into the drugs, but I already knew that. She said she’d heard that the 8th Street gang was”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“When I started doing community organizing in Boston's neighborhoods, working on all the issues that had affected my family - violence, poverty, guns - I realized that the sooner the Irish of Southie came to better understand their history as an "inferior race" by English standards and learned what it meant to be Irish beyond the happy-go-lucky tunes and bloody fistfights of Saint Patrick's Day, the sooner they would acknowledge Southie's poverty and its manipulation by gangsters and politicians. And maybe even work with black people in neighboring Roxbury on common issues, like the fact that both neighborhoods had been declared "death zones" by sociologists. I also became obsessed with the connection between the work I was doing and personal recovery from trauma, as I got close to a number of mothers whose kids had been murdered in the city.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under

“Someone told me you were worshipping the devil with the punk rocks!" he said, opening the jug.
Ma walked into the apartment, and Grandpa repeated that I'd joined the devil-worshippers. "With the punk rocks," he added proudly, liked he'd copped on to a new phenomenon.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under

“Look, he's just in another form! Do you understand?" Ma explained. I didn't know where she was going with it. The old man Wren looked down and gripped her hand, unable to say anything. Ma said, "Look! You know how you've taken many forms in this life?"
He looked up again.
"First you were a baby. Then you were a little kid running around these glens. Then you were a young man getting married."
Mr. Wren exclaimed, "Yes!" repeatedly, getting louder with every form he'd ever taken in this world. By the excited look on him, I thought Ma was going to do him in with memories. His trembling was getting worse and he cried, but not like a child, because he was crying and smiling at the same time. "You're not the same form you were even ten years ago! It's like evolution. Throughout this life you just go from form to form! Well, it's the same when you die. Your son is just in another form! Do you hear me?”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under