Teenage Wasteland Anne Tyler Quotes

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. ~ Anne Tyler

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? ~ Anne Tyler

I'm falling into disrepair ~ Anne Tyler

In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. ~ Anne Tyler

My stories are never quite good enough. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

A church without symbols, a church without baptism or communion where only the real things mattered and where the atonement must be as real as the sin itself, where for instance if you broke a playmate's toy in anger you must go home immediately and fetch a toy of your own, of as good or better quality, and give it to that playmate for keeps and then announce your error at Public Amending on Sunday. ~ Anne Tyler

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged. ~ Anne Tyler

I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland. ~ Rob Sheffield

it was all so new to her, he guessed. ~ Anne Tyler

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. ~ Lee Smith

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

When you have children, you're obligated to live. ~ Anne Tyler

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

What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth? ... The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others
one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact. ~ Anne Tyler

It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort. ~ Anne Tyler

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

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. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

The trouble with dying is you don't get to stay around and see how everything turns out. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

And all at once I had no one to trade looks with. ~ Anne Tyler

Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

Not until she'd left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn't ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

I saw a bird soaring out of a cave above the open sea. And there was something terrifying about the bird and the endless waves over which it flew. Higher and higher it went and the sky turned to silver and then gradually the silver faded and the sky went dark. The darkness of evening nothing to fear, really, nothing. Blessed darkness. But it was falling gradually and inexorably over nothing save this one tiny creature cawing in the wind above a great wasteland that was the world. Empty caves, empty sands, empty sea. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ 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

And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. "Oh, poor you!" she would say. "You're looking so tired!" Or "You must be feeling so lonely!" Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children's opinion. ~ 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

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 ... ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it ... ~ 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

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

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. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

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. ~ Anne Tyler

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? ~ Anne Tyler

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

... 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 ~ Anne Tyler

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