Quotes from Anne Tyler

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.

She wasn't always angry. She had lots of good days.

The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

When she grew up she was going to marry a man who came from a big, close, jolly family. He would get along with all of them—he'd be the same kind of man her father was

On weekends, she had once told us, she liked to go to Stebbins hardware and ask the gray-haired men who clerked there how to fix a sagging door, or what to do about a curling wallpaper seam. She really did need their advice, she said; but also, she found it a comfort. It took her back to the time when her father was alive.

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

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse?

Thinking time," their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person's eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann

My wife used to say that her idea of hell would be marrying Ghandi, Ben said ... Think about it: Ghandi was always the good one. Everyone else looked so rude and loud and self-centered by comparison.

Which was how she often did after flare-ups—pretending nothing had happened.

Oh, a French braid," Greta said. "That's it. And then when she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples, little leftover squiggles, for hours and hours afterward." "Yes…" "Well," David said, "that's how families work, too. You think you're free of them, but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever." Greta started laughing.

She went to the kitchen for plates, and as she returned, one of the

Willa said, "What…?" Then she said, "You're starting your job this June, though." "Right." "You want to get married in two months?" "Or it could be three, if you need more time to plan the wedding," he said. "You mean before I finish school?" "You can finish in California." "But at Kinney I have a full scholarship!" "So? You could get a scholarship in California, too.

big, and when you all come to visit it's too small." "We'll be fine

Next fall I'm taking his honors course in linguistic anthropology." "You think they don't teach foreign languages in San Diego?" he asked.

You're old for so much longer than you're young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair.

was just, seems like, born knowing how. He can figure

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?

Derek glanced over at her. Then he closed his magazine, leaving a finger inside as a marker, and undid his seat belt and stood up. "Trade places with me," he said. Willa gazed up at him imploringly. "Come on. Move." She fumbled for her seat belt. She undid the buckle, holding her breath, and then she clutched her purse and sat forward, wincing as she braced for the slam of the bullet. Nothing happened.

He had been forty-three years old—too young to think of making funeral plans. So all of that was left to Willa

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed. Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn't screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!

He didn't talk about Derek at all and he avoided any contact with Willa or his brother, instead spending his evenings shut away in his room twiddling tunelessly on his guitar. Sean was the opposite: he followed Willa around pestering her for every detail of his father's death.

How was it that she had never realized the power of the young back when she was young herself?