Anne Tyler Quotes

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.

There was a certain liberation in talking to a man who didn't have a full grasp of English. She could tell him anything and half of it would fly right past him, especially if the words came tumbling out fast enough

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.

He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

(About parenting ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

It's hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that's bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don't dare show their true feelings. No matter if they're hurting or desperate or stricken with grief, if they're heartsick or they're homesick or some huge dark guilt is hanging over them or they're about to fail big-time at something - 'Oh, I'm okay,' they say. 'Everything's just fine.' They're a whole lot less free than women are, when you think about it.

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.

Who said, 'You're only ever as happy as your least happy child?' " she'd asked Ree in last week's pottery class. "Socrates," Ree answered promptly. "Really? I was thinking more along the lines of Michelle Obama.

Independent? Bosh. That's just another word for selfish. It's stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.

Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end
to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things
even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos
ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.

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

That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.

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.

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

(The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

On Calvert Street, the row houses stood in two endless lines. "I don't see how you know which one was home," Luke had told him once, and Cody had been amazed. Oh, if you lived here you knew. They weren't alike at all, not really. One had dozens of roses struggling in its tiny front yard, another an illuminated Madonna glowing night and day in the parlor window. Some had their trim painted in astonishing colors, assertively, like people with their chins thrust out. The fact that they were attached didn't mean a thing.

wine. Three cans of beer

But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ...

you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this." "I thought you didn't want us to take sides." "No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say.

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

Last night I dreamed about her," he said. "She had this shawl wrapped around her shoulders with tassels hanging off it, and her hair was long like old times. She said, 'Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.' " He stopped speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Denny and Stem stood with a screen balanced between them and looked at each other helplessly.

"Then I woke up," Red said after a minute. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. "I thought, 'This must mean I miss having her close attention, the way I've always been used to.' Then I woke up again, for real. Have either of you ever done that? Dreamed that you woke up, and then found you'd still been asleep? I woke up for real and I thought, 'Oh, boy. I see I've still got a long way to go with this.' Seems I haven't quite gotten over it, you know?

Skinny as a fence post.

Peculiar, isn't it?" he said. "First you're scolding your children and then all at once they're so smart they're scolding you.

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.

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

My friend Luke told me once that he'd been considering my question about whether the dead ever visit. It was true that I had asked him, back around the time I asked Nate, but this was weeks and weeks later. Apparently he had been deliberating the issue ever since. "I've decided," he said, "that they don't visit. But I think if you knew them well enough, if you'd listened to them closely enough while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now. So the smart thing to do is, pay attention while they're living. But that's only my opinion.

You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

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.

he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel.

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.

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child - whichever one is unhappy.

But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories - all that they take away with them.

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 ...

You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so?

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?

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

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.

But it's like time is sort of ... balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don't you see.

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

I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping ...

narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end.

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed. Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn't screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!

There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

The trouble with dying," she'd told Jeannie once, "is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.

Peter sometimes claimed - jokingly, she assumed - that the whole country should keep its clocks set to the same hour, even though that meant that some states would have to conduct their business in the dark.

Each life is a kind of assignment, I believe," Eliza told her. "You're given this one assigned slot each time you come to earth, this little square of experience to work through. So even if your life has been troubled, I believe, it's what you're meant to deal with on this particular go-round.

She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.

Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

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.

A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.
'What, cremation?' she asked.
'Death.

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

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

system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He'd been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights.

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.

Music is so different now," she had said to [him] once. "It used to be 'Love Me Forever' and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.'
"Aw, Ma," he had said, "don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.

Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

"Yes, they would," Pyotr said mysteriously. He had been walking a couple of steps ahead of Kate, but now he dropped back and, without any warning, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. "But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl.

Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

She opened her eyes and studied him a moment. Then she slipped her hand in her pocket, come up with something and held it toward him - palming it, like a secret. "For you," she said.
"For me?"
"I'd like you to have it."
It was a snapshot stolen from her family album: Muriel as a toddler, clambering out of a wading pool.
She meant, he supposed, to give him the best of her. And so she had. But the best of her was not that cild's Shirley Temple hairdo. It was her fierceness as she fought her way toward the camera with her chin set awry and her eyes bright slits of determination. He yhanked her. He said he would keep it forever.

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me."
"Well, sure she would! You're her own kind, right?"
"I am her kind?"
Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, "I mean you're in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?" he asked. "No normal person could understand you people."
"What exactly do you find difficult to understand?" Dr. Battista asked him.
"Oh, you know, all that science jargon; I can't offhand - "
"I am researching autoimmune disorders," Dr. Battista said. "It's true that 'autoimmune' has four syllables, but perhaps if I broke the word down for you…

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

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

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

I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I'm beginning to think she's right.

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.

But what I hope for in a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

Was just, seems like, born knowing how. He can figure

apart," Abby said. "Yes, except he could put it back

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.

Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope.

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 spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work. from Back When We Were Grownups.

Sometimes, Kate was downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4. It

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?

Red remembered growing up in that house as heaven. There were enough children on Bouton Road to form two baseball teams, when they felt like it, and they spent all their free time playing out of doors - boys and girls together, little ones and big ones. Suppers were brief, pesky interruptions foisted on them by their mothers. They disappeared again till they were called in for bed, and then they came protesting, all sweaty-faced and hot with grass blades sticking to them, begging for just another half hour. "I bet I can still name every kid on the block," Red would tell his own children. But that was not so impressive, because most of those kids had stayed on in the neighborhood as grown-ups, or at least come back to it later after trying out other, lesser places. Red

But what if it's someone who's not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?'

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

... Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.
-- pg 273-74

She wished she had had a mother. Well, she had had a mother, but she wished she'd had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.

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?

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.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

Plenty of other books say how to see as much of the city as possible," his boss had told him. "You should say how to see as little.")

Apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.

When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

What if marrying Shelley meant that she would end up just like him, unable to realize a thing's happening or a moment's passing? What if it were like a contagious disease, so that soon she would be wandering around in a daze and incapable of putting her finger on any given thing and saying, that is that?

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.

Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at.

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get