Anne Tyler quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anne Tyler on Wise Famous Quotes.

wine. Three cans of beer

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

Those who forget the past tend to regret the future

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

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

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

Everyone must play his role.

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

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.

If you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

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

Past is past ... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.

Much of Macon's youth was ruled by connotations.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.

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

Not until she'd left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn't ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

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

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

I'm falling into disrepair

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

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Peculiar, isn't it?" he said. "First you're scolding your children and then all at once they're so smart they're scolding you.

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

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.

I spend about a year between novels.

She collected and polished resentments as if it were some kind of hobby.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.

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

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 don't type [when I write] because ... I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

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

it was all so new to her, he guessed.

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

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges

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.")

You're old for so much longer than you're young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair.

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

I write because I want to have more than one life.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

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

You're only ever as happy as your least happy child?'

And all at once I had no one to trade looks with.

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.

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

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.

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".

Apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.

Skinny as a fence post.

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

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!

If we had been any different, would they have loved us?

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

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

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.

For me, writing was the only way out.

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.

He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.

I wonder how many times we dream that kind of dream-something strange and illogical-and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.

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

All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near.

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

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

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

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

he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel.

And sometimes," he said, "you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.

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

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

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten, or dropped penny.

Was just, seems like, born knowing how. He can figure

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

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

In a way," I told Peggy, "it's like the grief has been covered over with some

My stories are never quite good enough.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

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.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

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

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