Anne Tyler Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

Anne Tyler
I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals... I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?

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

Anne Tyler
One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that other people will never know about.

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

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

Anne Tyler
I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. It's lucky I do it on paper. Probably I would be schizophrenic — and six times divorced — if I weren't writing.

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 life 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
'I'm falling into disrepair,' she told the children. 'I've outlived myself.'

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
'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
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

Anne Tyler
Ever considered what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul — chicken, pork, half a cow. We leave at nine and are back at ten, having caught an entire herd of beasts. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

Anne Tyler
They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

Anne Tyler
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Anne Tyler
None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

Anne Tyler
Look at how long we took deciding whom we'd marry, but this baby's waltzing in out of nowhere, not so much as a background check or a personality quiz. What if it turns out we don't have any shared interests?

Anne Tyler
Neither of them wore watches. On them, watches broke or lost themselves or speeded up to keep some lawless schedule of their own so you could almost see the minute hand racing around the dial.

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

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

Anne Tyler
Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

Anne Tyler