Quotes from Anne Tyler

I read so I live more than one life in more than one place.

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.

Justine's childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust.

A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years? Although Denny might not be okay, even now. Abby

People tended to be very spendthrift with their language, Kate had noticed. They used a lot more words than they needed to.

It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten, or dropped penny.

This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people. They don't always follow the etiquette.

Always bring a book, as protection against strangers. Magazines don't last. Newspapers from home will make you homesick, and newspapers from elsewhere will remind you you don't belong. You know how alien another paper's typeface seems.)

Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?' 

The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn't even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn't exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed

But still, you know how it is when you're missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for.

While the train racketed along, he sorted his currency into envelopes that he'd brought from home—each envelope clearly marked with a different denomination. (No fumbling with unfamiliar coins, no peering at misleading imprints, if you separate and classify foreign money ahead of time.)

The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.

Plenty of other books say how to see as much of the city as possible," his boss had told him. "You should say how to see as little.")

Alice often liked to imagine that a book was being written about her life. A narrator with an authoritative male voice was describing her every act. "Alice sighed" was a frequent observation.

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy. She circled the hall to close the door to

The smells of smoke and vinegar made him hungry; all he'd had for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich.

This was when I was still very young, of course. Back then I thought I understood nearly everything.

I'm worry if I come to close, they'll say I'm overstepping. They'll say I'm pushy or… emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think that I don't care. I really honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day.There's this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.

Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother's absences—her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.

But what helped more was to walk down a crowded sidewalk sometimes, or through a busy shopping mall, and reflect that almost everyone there had suffered some terrible loss. Sometimes more than one loss. Many had lost their dearest loves, but look at them: they were managing. They were putting one foot in front of the other. Some were even smiling. It could be done.

We live such tangled, fraught lives, he thought, but in the end we die like all the other animals and we're buried in the ground and after a few years we might as well not have existed. This should have depressed him, but instead it made him feel better. The light turned green and he started driving again.