Celestial Navigation Quotes

“I know what I am. I'm not blind. I have never had a marriage proposal or a love affair or an adventure, never any experience more interesting than patrolling the aisles of my Latin class looking for crib sheet and ponies--an old-maid schoolteacher. There are a thousand jokes about the likes of me. None of them are funny. I have seen people sum me up and dismiss me right while I was talking to them, as if what I am came through more clearly than any words I might choose to say. I see their eyes lose focus and settle elsewhere. Do they think that I don't realize? I suspected all along that I would never get what comes to others so easily. I have been bypassed, something has been held back from me. And the worst part is that I know it.”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“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.”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“Now I am alone again, he says. Finally. We can get down to what I have been waiting to do. What is it I have been waiting to do?”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

“Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke.”
― Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation