Anne Tyler Quotes

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

What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to repo...

Don't count on me to take you in because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song a...

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the mo...

The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can c...

She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact...

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

Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; n...

Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hang...

There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words ...

I'm falling into disrepair

The trouble with dying...is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the e...

She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever ...

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them ...

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

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

He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes...

Face it,' I said. 'There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may...

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is real...

Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot....

He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shin...

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

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down...

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, ...

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

It seems to me that since I've had children I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down...

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various character...

You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling y...

People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.

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

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

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

I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who...

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

For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be to...

It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. ...

For me, writing was the only way out.