33 Quotes by Mary Beth Keane

The thought landed lightly and easily, and as soon as Peter noted it there, everything that hadn’t quite made sense made sense again.

And then she saw it so clearly, the whole trajectory of their lives, a twin flare of lights against the gunmetal winter sky: we’re born, we get sick, we die. Beginning, middle, end. She saw her life as if held aloft by her own hand, and in an instant it spun away from her. Where did she want it to land? She was in the middle. The exact middle. Peter too. How could she have failed to notice that the beginning had come to an end?

He thought of what the Christian Brothers had said about a body being merely a vessel, about the spirit being the pilot light of one’s self.

She’d learned that the beginning of one’s life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.

And also, life goes more quickly now. Have you noticed that? Everything that used to move at a normal rate is moving faster now.

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another. In.

In the old country someone would have opened a window to let the man’s spirit fly out, but any souls let loose here in the South Bronx would be free only so far as they could bat around four walls until, exhausted, they wilted in the heat and were forgotten.

And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself – the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond – but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.

She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens.