A Patchwork Planet Quotes

“Ms. May,” I said, “I promise you’ll be out of here before you know it. What this other client was telling me just a few days ago: the older you get, the faster the time goes. By now it’s all a blur, she says.”
“Wrong,” Maud May said firmly.
“Wrong?”
“Time has stopped dead still,” she said.
Then she gave a snort and said, “No pun intended.”
― Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

“All at once I was standing at our front window one day, looking down at the driveway, and Natalie was buckling the baby into the car. This was a Volvo wagon her parents had given us when Opal was born. And I watched her shut the passenger door and walk around to the driver’s side, and I said to myself, ‘Why, great God in heaven! I seem to have married one of those station wagon mommies!’ So we got divorced.”
― Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

“Even so, the anger hung on a moment, like the white spot that stays in your vision after you have looked at a too bright light.”
― Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

“I mean, it’s a week after Christmas. What does she want with a tree?” “She says her seven grandchildren are stopping by for a visit. They’re spending the night on their way home from skiing, and she wants the house to look cheery, she says, and not old-ladyish and glum.” “Ah.” Grandchildren ruled the world, if you judged by most of our clients. “She needs it decorated too,” Mrs. Dibble was saying. “She says she can’t manage the upper branches, and if she climbed onto a step stool, she’s scared she might break a hip.” Breaking a hip was what else ruled the world—the fear of it, I mean. Big bugaboo, in the circles I traveled in.”
― Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

“Oh, what makes some people more virtuous than others? Is it something they know from birth? Don’t they ever feel that zingy, thrilling urge to smash the world to bits? Isn’t it possible, maybe, that good people are just luckier people? Couldn’t that be the explanation?”
― Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet