Ladder of Years Quotes

“But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“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

“It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“He'd been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he'd used the word "buy", apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“See, I’ve always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you. I keep asking myself: couldn’t Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Each life is a kind of assignment, I believe," Eliza told her. "You're given this one assigned slot each time you come to earth, this little square of experience to work through. So even if your life has been troubled, I believe, it's what you're meant to deal with on this particular go-round.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean's edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving.

Where they were going without her.

How to say goodbye.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten, or dropped penny.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Didn’t it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life’s many ironies.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“Didn't it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“And sometimes," he said, "you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

“All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by.”
― Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years