Author: Ann Beattie
Quotes of Author: Ann Beattie
This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying "snow," my lips move so that they kiss air. No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road - an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was. book-quotememoryJane remembers those years, though, as if they had been {a movie}--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over {"Remember last night?"}, while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. {In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.} book-quoteordinarinessordinary-life
