Anne Tyler Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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