Anne Tyler Quotes

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

— 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

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

— 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's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.”

— Anne Tyler

“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

“Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days,and then imagine happening upon that person out in public ... You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving everything up for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.

— Anne Tyler

“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

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

— Anne Tyler

Dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such?

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

“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

“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

“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

“What did Ethan care? _He_ had no trouble navigating. This was because he'd lived all his life in one house, was Macon's theory; while a person who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog - adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— 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

“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

“Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven's sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was "cool" ("I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger," she had said), did she not realize that "cool" had been used in Abby's time, too, not to mention long before?”

— Anne Tyler

Reading is the first to go, my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.

— Anne Tyler

“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

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

— Anne Tyler

“He wanted to say, Muriel, forgive me, but since my son died, sex has ... turned. (As milk turns; that was how he thought of it. As milk will alter its basic nature and turn sour.) I really don't think of it anymore. I honestly don't. I can't imagine anymore what all that fuss was about. Now it seems pathetic.”

— Anne Tyler

“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

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

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

— Anne Tyler

“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

Understand." Allie said, "Well, I don't know that we would need to go that far." He relaxed his grip on the phone. The two young girls just behind him could not stop laughing. They kept dissolving in cascades of giggles, sputtering and squeaking. What did girls that age find so

— Anne Tyler

“A church without symbols, a church without baptism or communion where only the real things mattered and where the atonement must be as real as the sin itself, where for instance if you broke a playmate's toy in anger you must go home immediately and fetch a toy of your own, of as good or better quality, and give it to that playmate for keeps and then announce your error at Public Amending on Sunday.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

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

“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

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

— Anne Tyler

“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

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

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

“When I read, I'm purely a reader.”

— Anne Tyler

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

— Anne Tyler

“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

“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

How plotless real life was!

— Anne Tyler

“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