The Beginner's Goodbye Quotes

“People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“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

“That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some patient. I want to make sure you realize that.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I have saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event ans it sort of levels out, so to speak - settles into the general landscape.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“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

“My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“Reading is the first to go," my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“My friend Luke told me once that he’d been considering my question about whether the dead ever visit. It was true that I had asked him, back around the time I asked Nate, but this was weeks and weeks later. Apparently he had been deliberating the issue ever since. “I’ve decided,” he said, “that they don’t visit. But I think if you knew them well enough, if you’d listened to them closely enough while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now. So the smart thing to do is, pay attention while they’re living. But that’s only my opinion.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“In a way,” I told Peggy, “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, every now and then, I lift a 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

“I think if you knew them well enough, if you'd listened to them closely enough while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now. So the smart thing to do is, pay attention while they're living.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening up on that person out in public . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“People who hadn’t suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“Oh, well. I'll just tell her you seem to have survived it," she said.
Roger said, "Honestly, Ann-Marie!" as if surviving a loved one's death were somehow reprehensible. But the odd thing was, right at that moment I realized that I had survived it. I pictured Ann-Marie's friend waking up this morning, the first full day of her life without her husband, and I thanked heaven that I was past that stage myself. Even though I still felt a constant ache, I seemed unknowingly to have traveled a little distance away from that first unbearable pain.
I sat up straighter and drew a deep breath, and it was then that I began to believe that I really might make my way through this.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“Of course. We go around and around in this world, and here we go again.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one’s ring from a nurse or an undertaker.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“On weekends, she had once told us, she liked to go to Stebbins hardware and ask the gray-haired men who clerked there how to fix a sagging door, or what to do about a curling wallpaper seam. She really did need their advice, she said; but also, she found it a comfort. It took her back to the time when her father was alive.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye