Quotessence
Home / Authors / Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllWritingLiteraturePeopleThinkingCharacterIfsNovelBookWantChildren

Famous Anne Tyler Quotes

“Oh, well. I'll just tell her you seem to have survived it," she said. Roger said, "Honestly, Ann-Marie!" as if surviving a loved one's death were somehow reprehensible. But the odd thing was, right at that moment I realized that I had survived it. I pictured Ann-Marie's friend waking up this morning, the first full day of her life without her husband, and I thanked heaven that I was past that stage myself. Even though I still felt a constant ache, I seemed unknowingly to have traveled a little distance away from that first unbearable pain. I sat up straighter and drew a deep breath, and it was then that I began to believe that I really might make my way through this.”

LossGriefMoving OnBereavement
Book:The Beginner's Goodbye
Create image

“Finally Reverend Emmett asked, 'Shall we walk on?' So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow - not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.”

FaithHopeRedemption
Book:Saint Maybe
Create image

“...sometimes I stand there watching them and I see they believe they're completely special, the first, the only people ever to feel the way they're feeling. They believe they'll live happily ever after, that all the other marriages going on around them - those ordinary, worn-down, flattened-in arrangements - why, those are nothing like they'll have. They'll never setlle for so little. And it makes me mad. I can't help it, Cody. I know it's selfish, but I can't help it. I want to ask them, Who do you think you are, anyhow? Do you imagine you're unique? Do you really suppose I was always this old difficult woman? Cody, listen. I was special too, once, to someone. I could just reach out and lay a fingertip on his arm while he was talking and he would instantly fall silent and get all confused. I had hopes; I was courted; I had the most beautiful wedding. I had three lovely pregnancies, where every morning I woke up knowing something perfect would happen in nine months, eights months, seven months...so it seemed I was full of light; it was light and plans that filled me. And then while you children were little, why, I was the center of your worlds! I was everything to you! It was Mother this and Mother that, and 'Where's Mother? Where's she gone to?' and the moment you came in from school, 'Mother? Are you home?' It's not fair, Cody. It's really not fair; now I'm old and I walk along unnoticed, just like anyone else. It strikes me as unjust, Cody.”

LoveEnvyOld AgeCouples
Book:Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Create image

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed last night in his pajamas she said. And I saw the back of his neck, this fragile slender stem of a neck and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere any place on this planet who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. 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 impossible perfect he is? And that will never again happen to Douglas. He has nobody left on earth who thinks he's special [...] I need this. I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can't! I'd rather die!”

LoveMotherSonPrideMotherhoodParentsAdoption
Book:A Spool of Blue Thread
Create image

“وبعدئذ حينما كنتم ايها الاطفال صغارا، كنت انا مركز عوالمكم! كنت كل شىء بالنسبة لكم! كنت تجدنى فى كل اموركم وتفاصيلكم الصغيرة، و "اين امى؟ الى اين ذهبت؟" وفى اللحظة التى تعودون فيها من المدرسة، "امى؟ هل عدت الى البيت؟" ليس هذا عدلا ، يا كودى. ليس هذا عدلا فى الواقع، الان انا عجوز وامشى دون ان يلاحظنى احد. يبدو لى لى هذا ظلما يا كودى. لكن لا تخبر الاخرين اننى قلت هذا". صفحة 216”

FamilyMothersElderly Women
Author:Anne Tyler
Create image

“And over such a trivial issue, after all their years together! She couldn't even exactly remember the issue! Why that particular one? Why not any of the hundreds of others? Once again Michael hesitated, but then he turned toward the foyer. She heard the front door latch, and a moment later his car lights lit up and backed out of the driveway. She went on staring straight ahead of her. She had a slippery, off-balance feeling, the feeling a person might get if she were sitting on a stopped train and the train next to hers started gliding away and she wasn't sure, for a second, whether it was her train or the other one that was moving.”

DivorceSeparationLeft BehindLeave Taking
Book:The Amateur Marriage
Create image

“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.”

DeathHeaven
Author:Anne Tyler
Create image

“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.”

PeopleYearsMovingJoyNamesPositionHabitSorrowAncientCarefulExtremesSatFiftyCustomsRoutineOld PeopleFurnitureRiteFamily Name
Book:Anne Tyler: a new collection : three complete novels
Create image

“Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!”

ThinkingMeanEarthFunnyAnimalHalfDogStoresPetChickensIronicCowsHuntersMy DogGroceriesPuppyMost AmazingPorkCanineGrocery StoresDog LoverHaulPoodlesPuppy DogPet AnimalsCat And DogPet DogDog LoveDog RescueGreat DogPoodle DogsCute DogLong HaulGreat PetFunny DogCat DogDogs And LifeAnimal RescueI Love My DogFaithful DogsDog HeavenHeaven And DogsPets In HeavenGrocersLoving DogBeagles The Dog
Book:Anne Tyler: a new collection : three complete novels
Create image