Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Tyler - Page 2

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

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

I'm falling into disrepair

I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.

I wonder how many times we dream that kind of dream-something strange and illogical-and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.

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

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.

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Liam really enjoyed a good movie. He found it restful to watch people's conversations without being expected to join in. But he always felt sort of lonesome if he didn't have someone next to him to nudge in the ribs at the good parts.

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

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.

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.

When I read, I'm purely a reader

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.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

When you have children, you're obligated to live.

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

How plotless real life was!

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

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

Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

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

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

My stories are never quite good enough

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

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.

They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

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.

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

I spend about a year between novels

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing

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

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.

...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.

He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about. (from 'Celestial Navigation')

... everyone must play his role.

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.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

I write because I want to have more than one life.

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

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

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

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.

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

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

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

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

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.

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.

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