Anne Tyler Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
She'd been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out.

Anne Tyler
There are days when I sink into my novel like a pool and emerge feeling blank and bemused and used up.

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

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

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

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

Anne Tyler
I remember leaving the hospital... thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.'

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

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

Anne Tyler
We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

Anne Tyler
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 spend a great deal of my time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

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

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
His mind was an intricate, multi-geared machine, or perhaps some little animal with skittery paws.

Anne Tyler
Liam really enjoyed a good movie. He found it restful to watch people's conversations without being expected to join in. But he always felt sort of lonesome if he didn't have someone next to him to nudge in the ribs at the good parts.

Anne Tyler
'He's not himself at all today,' Mr. Somerset told me. People say that about Jeremy quite often, but what they mean is that he is not like other people. He is always himself. That's what's wrong with him.

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

Anne Tyler
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.

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

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

Anne Tyler
People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

Anne Tyler
Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

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

Anne Tyler