Anne Tyler Quotes

#1. I don't want to say I hear voices; well, actually I do hear voices, but I don't think it's supernatural. I think it's just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.

Anne Tyler

#2. But it's like time is sort of ... balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don't you see.

Anne Tyler

#3. Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

Anne Tyler

#4. I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping ...

Anne Tyler

#5. The disappointments seemed to escape the family's notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn't a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

Anne Tyler

#6. It's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.

Anne Tyler

#7. While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

Anne Tyler

#8. Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.

Anne Tyler

#9. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

Anne Tyler

#10. But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Anne Tyler

#11. She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses

Anne Tyler

#12. When you come [to a baseball game] in person, you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don't have any choice but to accept it.

Anne Tyler

#13. He thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.

Anne Tyler

#14. It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

Anne Tyler

#15. The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them

Anne Tyler

#16. Independent? Bosh. That's just another word for selfish. It's stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.

Anne Tyler

#17. A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.

Anne Tyler

#18. when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I

Anne Tyler

#19. When you have children, you're obligated to live.

Anne Tyler

#20. Apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.

Anne Tyler

#21. We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

Anne Tyler

#22. Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.'

Anne Tyler

#23. I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.

Anne Tyler

#24. This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some patient. I want to make sure you realize that.

Anne Tyler

#25. He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

Anne Tyler

#26. It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

Anne Tyler

#27. None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

Anne Tyler

#28. You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.

Anne Tyler

#29. 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

#30. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

Anne Tyler

#31. Big, and when you all come to visit it's too small." "We'll be fine,

Anne Tyler

#32. He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.

Anne Tyler

#33. You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough.

Anne Tyler

#34. Who would have thought," the witch had asked, "that a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?

Anne Tyler

#35. Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

Anne Tyler

#36. I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

Anne Tyler

#37. And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

Anne Tyler

#38. My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.

Anne Tyler

#39. She liked to think that she was wearing her beauty out - using it up, she liked to think. She took some satisfaction in it, like a housewife industriously making her way through a jar of something she did not enjoy, would not buy again, but couldn't just discard, of course.

Anne Tyler

#40. The thing about caller ID is," Red said, more or less to himself, "it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.

Anne Tyler

#41. I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

Anne Tyler

#42. My stories are never quite good enough.

Anne Tyler

#43. I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.

Anne Tyler

#44. The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.

Anne Tyler

#45. I spend about a year between novels.

Anne Tyler

#46. Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

Anne Tyler

#47. The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Anne Tyler

#48. You belong," he told her. "You belong just as much as I do, or, who, or Bitsy or ... It's just like Christmas. We all think the others belong more.

Anne Tyler

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. wine. Three cans of beer

Anne Tyler

#52. apart," Abby said. "Yes, except he could put it back

Anne Tyler

#53. Just like his daddy, but his daddy wants Red to be different from him. Isn't that always how it is?

Anne Tyler

#54. 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.
(from 'Celestial Navigation')

Anne Tyler

#55. That was Julian for you: reckless. A dashing sailor, a speedy driver, a frequenter of single bars, he was the kind of man who would make a purchase without consulting _Consumer Reports_.

Anne Tyler

#56. Not only had she paid him attention, but she had secretly taken more pleasure in him than in any of the others.

Anne Tyler

#57. It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.

Anne Tyler

#58. Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination; Liam couldn't decide which.

Anne Tyler

#59. The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

Anne Tyler

#60. When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

Anne Tyler

#61. Sometimes, Kate was downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4. It

Anne Tyler

#62. narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end.

Anne Tyler

#63. People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.

Anne Tyler

#64. Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

Anne Tyler

#65. (About parenting ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

Anne Tyler

#66. Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store.

Anne Tyler

#67. If you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

Anne Tyler

#68. I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

Anne Tyler

#69. Agatha sighed. "As the hart panteth after the water brooks," she said flatly, "so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.

Anne Tyler

#70. But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty inky smell of mental fidgeting.

Anne Tyler

#71. I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

Anne Tyler

#72. I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at.

Anne Tyler

#73. But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

Anne Tyler

#74. Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

Anne Tyler

#75. The trouble with dying," she'd told Jeannie once, "is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.

Anne Tyler

#76. People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

Anne Tyler

#77. Those who forget the past tend to regret the future

Anne Tyler

#78. I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

Anne Tyler

#79. It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

Anne Tyler

#80. Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.
'What, cremation?' she asked.
'Death.

Anne Tyler

#81. Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.

Anne Tyler

#82. Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

Anne Tyler

#83. should join in on "Shall We Gather at

Anne Tyler

#84. Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

Anne Tyler

#85. Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne.

Anne Tyler

#86. I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

Anne Tyler

#87. I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.

Anne Tyler

#88. I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.

Anne Tyler

#89. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

Anne Tyler

#90. 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

#91. There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

Anne Tyler

#92. Plenty of other books say how to see as much of the city as possible," his boss had told him. "You should say how to see as little.")

Anne Tyler

#93. For me, writing something down was the only road out.

Anne Tyler

#94. He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given him. Someone's life, a small set of lives had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.

Anne Tyler

#95. The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.

Anne Tyler

#96. I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Anne Tyler

#97. Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

Anne Tyler

#98. In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open.

Anne Tyler

#99. You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child - whichever one is unhappy.

Anne Tyler

#100. He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.

Anne Tyler