Anne Tyler > Quotes

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“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, The Accidental Tourist

“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”
― Anne Tyler

“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.”
― Anne Tyler

“I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get”
― Anne Tyler

“It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“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

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
― Anne Tyler

“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

“People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

“Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things--even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos--ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“(The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)”
― Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl

“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, The Beginner's Goodbye

“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, The Accidental Tourist

“There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

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

“Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.”
― Anne Tyler, The Tin Can Tree

“He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.”
― Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

“If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.”
― Anne Tyler

“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, A Spool of Blue Thread

“When you have children, you're obligated to live.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Houses need humans,” Red said. “You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear—scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such—but that’s nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It’s like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“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

“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

“She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.”
― Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

“I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.”
― Anne Tyler

“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, A Spool of Blue Thread