Anne Tyler > Quotes

“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”
― Anne Tyler

“I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get”
― Anne Tyler

“One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about.

(from 'Celestial Navigation')”
― Anne Tyler

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
― Anne Tyler

“It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have. ”
― Anne Tyler

“It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.”
― Anne Tyler

“There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.”
― Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.”
― Anne Tyler

“He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.”
― Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

“Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things--even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos--ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.”
― Anne Tyler

“...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Liam really enjoyed a good movie. He found it restful to watch people's conversations without being expected to join in. But he always felt sort of lonesome if he didn't have someone next to him to nudge in the ribs at the good parts.”
― Anne Tyler, Noah's Compass

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”
― Anne Tyler

“He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“When you have children, you're obligated to live.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.”
― Anne Tyler

“...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.”
― Anne Tyler, The Tin Can Tree

“Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination; Liam couldn't decide which.”
― Anne Tyler, Noah's Compass

“I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.”
― Anne Tyler

“Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne.”
― Anne Tyler

“Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food--to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people's lives. Couldn't you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food?”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.
'What, cremation?' she asked.
'Death.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with "Frankly,"' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such?”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ...”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper baskets; they stepped on their own skirts. ”
― Anne Tyler, Noah's Compass

“seven.
seven was when ethan had learned to ride a bicycle.
macon was visited by one of those memories that dent the skin, that strain the muscles. he felt the seat of ethan's bike pressing into his hand--the curled-under edge at the rear that you hold onto when you're trying to keep a bicycle upright. he felt the sidewalk slapping against his soles as he ran. he felt himself let go, slow to a walk, stop with his hands on his hips to call out, "you've got her now! you've got her!" and ethan rode away from him, strong and proud and straight-backed, his hair picking up the light till he passed beneath and oak tree. ”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the "serving size" listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size....”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“When you come [to a baseball game] in person, you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don't have any choice but to accept it.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“...apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.”
― Anne Tyler

“I write because I want to have more than one life.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons