Anne Tyler Quotes

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

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

~ Anne Tyler

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

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

~ Anne Tyler

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

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

~ Anne Tyler

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

~ Anne Tyler

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

She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.

~ Anne Tyler

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

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. 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

For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.

~ Anne Tyler

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

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

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

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

~ Anne Tyler

Don't count on me to take you in because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

~ Anne Tyler

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

What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth?...The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others--one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.

~ Anne Tyler

He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

~ Anne Tyler

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

~ Anne Tyler

For me, writing was the only way out.

~ Anne Tyler

The trouble with dying...is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.

~ Anne Tyler

I'm falling into disrepair

~ Anne Tyler

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.

~ Anne Tyler

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

~ Anne Tyler

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

~ Anne Tyler

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

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

~ Anne Tyler

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

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

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

~ Anne Tyler

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

~ Anne Tyler

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

~ Anne Tyler