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1 " I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them. "
― Anne Tyler , The Accidental Tourist
2 " It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice. "
― Anne Tyler
3 " I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get "
4 " 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. "
5 " Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.'What, cremation?' she asked.'Death. "
― Anne Tyler , Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
6 " It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from. "
7 " It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work. "
― Anne Tyler , Back When We Were Grownups
8 " 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. "
― Anne Tyler , The Beginner's Goodbye
9 " 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. "
10 " She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. "
― Anne Tyler , A Spool of Blue Thread
11 " You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history. "
― Anne Tyler , Ladder of Years
12 " 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. "
13 " People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. 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. "
14 " For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow. "
― Anne Tyler , The Amateur Marriage
15 " Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely. "
― Anne Tyler , Breathing Lessons
16 " 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. "
17 " He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart. "
18 " Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him. "
19 " The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them "
20 " 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 and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us. "
