Quotes from Ann Beattie

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony.

Nothing is so lovely as a quietly snoring dog and some evening Brahms, as you sit in a comfortably overstuffed chair with your feet on the footstool.

Are you happy?" "I think I may be going to be happy." Remember, things do not force, forge or fashion. They fall into place

People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.

When we came in she had her chair sideways, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctors had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time; she should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn't a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike

Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they're leaving out sugar)

Might as well wear loafers without socks. Or take out a membership at the Reading Room on the path above the beach—the Reading Room, where the joke was that there wasn't a book in the entire place.

I wasn't the sort of person who struck up conversations with strangers.

Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist's dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?

Startled starlings flew up out of the high grass, their black whorl a little tornado that did not touch down and therefore did no damage. They disappeared like a momentary perception above Yancey's head, fanning out and flying west. Or like the clotted words crammed into a cartoon bubble.

The car starts the first time he turns the key.

The rum and Coke tastes just awful. He wishes he had Susan's plain Coke.

We both loved Mac for his practicality. We loved him because we saw that he was naive, to think there was always a way for people to get help.

Then the auctioneer introduced himself [,,,,]. He started to speak into the microphone, a maddening, jammed-up sequence of words that crashed like bumper cars, after which everything sorted itself into some kind of sense again, and after the fact you could understand most of what he'd said.

I guess that I have been thinking about how graceful you were, and although it is none of my business, I wondered whether you might not be paying a price for being that way. . . . People want to have an easy fix on other people, and since you are Cindi Coeur, it's easy to assume that someone who satirizes our shortcomings has set herself above us.

I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.