Mary Beth Keane > Quotes

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don't know what they're doing any better than kids do. That's the truth.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“They'd both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it...because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it's who you are.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“She'd learned that the beginning of one's life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“...and sometimes when he watched her - searching for something in her bag, or peeling an apple with her knuckle guiding the blade - he felt a shiver of panic that he'd almost not met her.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“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.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“It wasn't that she didn't love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he'd figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“Kate thought about their wedding day as a conclusion to something, where he thought about it as a beginning. Rising action versus falling action. They were reading different books.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“Now she wondered if presence was the thing her new neighbor had, if it was something a person had to be born with and could never be learned.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room, anyone else who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“There was no predicting where life would go. There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it - the words he'd chosen when he told his uncle Patsy that he'd gotten into the police academy - because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it's who you are.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for awhile, but you couldn't go down two streets at once. The things they didn't end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn't lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.”
― Mary Beth Keane, The Half Moon

“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”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“But things are meant to change, Peter said. Because life changes and people change. As long as we change together, we’re okay.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“He felt lost long before his mother left his life, he wanted to tell her, but it would ruin their dinner, their night. He thought of Frankie and Molly doing their homework with music and talking and laughter in the background. The doorbell ringing, kids stopping by, Kate on the phone, pots boiling over, everything a chaos of love. Then he thought of himself at their ages, alone in a silent house, listening for a creak on the stairs.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“A brand new person, made of nothing.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“not all problems looked the same, but that didn’t mean they weren’t problems.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“She knew that if she asked him to stay, he would. He’d settle right in on the couch and stay the night, the whole week. He wouldn’t ask for a blanket. He wouldn’t ask for a shower. He’d stay exactly where she needed him to be until she told him it was okay to go. Just imagining him there made her feel easier, made her feel as if she’d been thrown a rope, made her feel as if the very room they were standing in was more solidly constructed. She wanted him to stay so badly that she had to sit down, turn away from him a little or else he’d know.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“She wanted a cure for grief and she wanted someone to tell her where to find it.”
― Mary Beth Keane, The Half Moon

“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.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“Speaking was a habit she'd gotten into years ago, in the distant past, and now that she'd stopped she felt no desire to start again. It was pointless anyway - all the blah-blah-blabbing and, still, no one understood each other.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“but that was the story with men and women since the beginning of time. They never saw each other clearly until it was too late.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“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.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes