Top 100 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. I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.
Anne Tyler
#4. Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges
Anne Tyler
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?
Anne Tyler
#10. He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.
Anne Tyler
#11. One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years?
Anne Tyler
#12. You're old for so much longer than you're young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair.
Anne Tyler
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. It's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
Anne Tyler
#16. While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.
Anne Tyler
#17. Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.
Anne Tyler
#18. I write because I want to have more than one life.
Anne Tyler
#19. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
Anne Tyler
#20. But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
Anne Tyler
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.
Anne Tyler
#24. Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables ...
Anne Tyler
#25. He thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.
Anne Tyler
#26. 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
#27. Sometimes," she said, "it seems to me there's just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over.
Anne Tyler
#28. The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them
Anne Tyler
#29. This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.
Anne Tyler
#30. Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.
Anne Tyler
#31. It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing - empty far longer than full. so much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they'd been with her.
Anne Tyler
#32. My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
Anne Tyler
#34. My writing is sort of 'Sidney Sheldon meets Anne Tyler.'
John Searles
#35. 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
#36. I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
Anne Tyler
#37. A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.
Anne Tyler
#38. 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
#39. When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Anne Tyler
#40. Apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.
Anne Tyler
#41. 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
#42. There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
Anne Tyler
#43. Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we'd been.
Anne Tyler
#44. Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.'
Anne Tyler
#45. On Disney, we stick to the script. But you go to the 'Grown Ups set' and it's completely different. Same thing with Tyler Perry - it's nothing but ad-libbing.
China Anne McClain
#46. Was just, seems like, born knowing how. He can figure
Anne Tyler
#47. you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this." "I thought you didn't want us to take sides." "No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say.
Anne Tyler
#48. But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.
Anne Tyler
#49. 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
#50. I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.
Anne Tyler
#51. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.
Anne Tyler
#52. This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some patient. I want to make sure you realize that.
Anne Tyler
#53. Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.
Anne Tyler
#54. Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food
to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people's lives. Couldn't you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food?
Anne Tyler
#55. He must have some Tartar in him, don't you think?" "I have no idea," Kate said. "Or is it 'Tatar.
Anne Tyler
#56. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories - all that they take away with them.
Anne Tyler
#57. There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.
Anne Tyler
#58. There was a certain liberation in talking to a man who didn't have a full grasp of English. She could tell him anything and half of it would fly right past him, especially if the words came tumbling out fast enough
Anne Tyler
#59. I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?
Anne Tyler
#60. He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
Anne Tyler
#61. It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
Anne Tyler
#62. Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.
Anne Tyler
#63. he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel.
Anne Tyler
#64. It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
Anne Tyler
#65. I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.
Anne Tyler
#66. It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Anne Tyler
#67. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler
#68. Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ...
Anne Tyler
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. But Nora had said, "Oh, no. I don't believe in dative evangelizing." Abby had repeated this later to the girls: "She doesn't believe in 'dative evangelizing.
Anne Tyler
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. And sometimes," he said, "you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.
Anne Tyler
#78. 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
#79. And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
Anne Tyler
#80. 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
#81. You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?
Anne Tyler
#82. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.
Anne Tyler
#83. I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.
Anne Tyler
#84. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
Anne Tyler
#85. For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
Anne Tyler
#86. Big, and when you all come to visit it's too small." "We'll be fine,
Anne Tyler
#87. She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work. from Back When We Were Grownups.
Anne Tyler
#88. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
Anne Tyler
#89. 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
#90. It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.
Anne Tyler
#91. I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.
Anne Tyler
#92. I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
Anne Tyler
#93. In a way," I told Peggy, "it's like the grief has been covered over with some
Anne Tyler
#94. I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.
Anne Tyler
#95. Face it,' I said. 'There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got,' I said.
Anne Tyler
#96. You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough.
Anne Tyler
#97. I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
Caroline Thompson
#98. Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.
Anne Tyler
#99. Much of Macon's youth was ruled by connotations.
Anne Tyler
#100. But what if it's someone who's not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?'
Anne Tyler
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top