Breathing Lessons Quotes

“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

“Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“At this moment (letting a breeze ripple through her fingers like warm water), Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air - something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“All those things we used to promise ourselves we'd never, ever do when we grew up. Like we promised we wouldn't mince when we walk barefoot. We promised we wouldn't lie out on the beach tanning instead of swimming, or swimming with our chins high so we wouldn't wet our hairdos. We promised we wouldn't wash the dishes right after supper because that would take us away from our husbands; remember that? How long since you saved the dishes till morning so you could be with Max? How long since Max even noticed that you didn't?”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the old scabby, stippled surface.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“And all at once I had no one to trade looks with.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort.”
― 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

“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

“Sometimes, after an especially trying day, she felt an urge to burn everything she had worn.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Leroy remained silent, and no wonder; Maggie knew how chirpy and artificial she sounded. An old person, trying too hard. But if only Leroy could see that Maggie was still young underneath, just peering out from behind an older face mask!”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“However different the two might be in other ways, they both had this notion that reading up on something, getting equipped for something, would put them in control.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“How was it that she had never realized the power of the young back when she was young herself?”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn’t remembered so well how it felt to be a child.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“She seemed to have fallen in love again. In love with her own husband! The convenience of it pleased her—like finding right in her pantry all the fixings she needed for a new recipe.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“If she was easily swayed, she thought, at least she had chosen who would sway her. If she was locked in a pattern, at least she had chosen what that pattern would be. She felt strong and free and definite.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“It’s just time to marry, that’s all,” she said. “I’m so tired of dating! I’m so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It’s going to be like getting out of a girdle; that’s exactly how I picture it.” “What are you saying?” Maggie asked. She was almost afraid of the answer. “Are you telling me you don’t really love Max?” “Of course I love him,” Serena said. She blended the dots into her skin. “But I’ve loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson our sophomore year—remember him? But it wasn’t time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I’m marrying.” Maggie didn’t know what to think. Did everybody feel that way? Had the grownups been spreading fairy tales? “The minute I saw Eleanor,” her oldest brother had told her once, “I said, ‘That girl is going to be my wife someday.’ ” It hadn’t occurred to Maggie that he might simply have been ready for a wife, and therefore had his eye out for the likeliest prospect. So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie’s view of things. “We’re not in the hands of fate after all,” she seemed to be saying. “Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free anytime we care to.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“The houses here had a distinctly Pennsylvanian air, Maggie thought. They were mostly tall stone rectangles, flat-faced, set close to the road, with a meager supply of narrow windows.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Wasn’t it odd, she said, how much younger they were than their parents had been at the very same age.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“She’d been so intent on not turning into her mother, she had gone and turned into her father.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse?”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children’s births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boy’s lament for a girl who didn’t love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the panty-hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We’re all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“Men just generated wires and cords and electrical tape everywhere they went, somehow. They might not even be aware of it.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn’t remembered so well how it felt to be a child.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons