Anne Tyler Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
'The doctor says I'm going blind,' she told the children, but privately, she'd intended to do no such thing.

Anne Tyler
She had supposed that on her deathbed, she would have something final to tell her children when they gathered round. But nothing was final. She didn't have anything to tell them. She felt a kind of shyness; she felt inadequate.

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

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

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

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

Anne Tyler
'You almost died,' a nurse told her. But that was nonsense. Of course she wouldn't have died; she had children. When you have children, you're obligated to live.

Anne Tyler
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
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.

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

Anne Tyler
He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

Anne Tyler
See, there's this cook, this real country cook, and pot roast is the least of what she does. There's also pan-fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, beaten biscuits genuinely beat on a stump with the back of an ax.

Anne Tyler
It was typical of him that he lacked the taste to make a final exit. He spent too long at his farewells, chatting in the doorway, letting in the cold.

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

Anne Tyler
Oh, it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son — did I tell you that when you were young?

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

Anne Tyler
Like most heavy people, she had long ago stopped expecting anything of her clothes.

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

Anne Tyler