Quotes from Anne Tyler

But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she'd felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl's body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn't like merging.

In the living room, sectional couches lumbered through the vast space like a herd of rhinos, and both coffee tables were the size of double beds.

He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given him. Someone's life, a small set of lives had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.

She liked to think that she was wearing her beauty out—using it up, she liked to think. She took some satisfaction in it, like a housewife industriously making her way through a jar of something she did not enjoy, would not buy again, but couldn't just discard, of course.

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.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.

it always annoyed him when people implied you had to have a religion in order to hold to any standards of behavior.

Music is so different now, she had said to [him] once. It used to be 'Love Me Forever' and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' Aw, Ma, he had said, don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.

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.

I am the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve… You didn't think I was so great anymore… You started finding fault with all I said...

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.

Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn't forced themselves to mess it up?

Sunday 11:05 AM Hi Kate I text you! Hi. U r home now? Spell things out, for heaven's sake. You're not some teenager. You are home now? No.

Kate said, "Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely

she had warned Kate not ever to let a man meddle with the housework. "He'll get all carried away with it," she'd said, "and your life won't never be your own after that.

You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers: No message. Harpo." That made him grin. Sarah said, "You would think it was funny." "Well? Isn't it?

She's so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she's not, let's say, very…cerebral. And she doesn't have your backbone, your fiber.

She had no patience with foreign accents.

Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean's edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.

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.

If you can't say something nice,' " Jason mumbled, " 'don't say nothing at all.'