Quotes from Anne Tyler

She'd been so intent on not turning into her mother, she had gone and turned into her father.

Many of your fellow church members probably don't believe , either, but at least in church you put yourself in position for belief. Otherwise, you reduce the possibility.

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

Oh, sounds were what brought the past alive most clearly!

You belong," he told her. "You belong just as much as I do, or, who, or Bitsy or Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It's just like Christmas. We all think the others belong more.

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

Carla was pleasant but distracted, as if she were wondering whether she'd left a burner on at home.

Same for the photos on the facing page: two little girls crammed into an armchair with a puppy, and a baby whose vast bouffant christening gown seemed to be wearing him rather than the other way around. There were no captions. Once the subjects' identities must have seemed so obvious; it hadn't occurred to the album's creator that the time would come when no one alive remembered them.

make myself count to ten before I speak to the

I believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.

So, this is how it works," she said. "This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," he said. "And little cruelties," she agreed, and she swung his hand between them. He

Then he returned to his room and switched on the evening news. The world was doing poorly;

Leroy remained silent, and no wonder; Maggie knew how chirpy and artificial she sounded. An old person, trying too hard. But if only Leroy could see that Maggie was still young underneath, just peering out from behind an older face mask!

On grieving: I broke my days into separate moments. See, it's true, I didn't have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on TV.

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

And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

didn't paintings lie also? They showed hours instead of minutes.

understand." Allie said, "Well, I don't know that we would need to go that far." He relaxed his grip on the phone. The two young girls just behind him could not stop laughing. They kept dissolving in cascades of giggles, sputtering and squeaking. What did girls that age find so

You did mess them up!' And she had her hairbrush in her hand because I guess she'd been doing her hair and she started hitting me in the head with it, slam on one side of my head, slam on the other side, and I was ducking away and shielding my head—" "Yes, well," Willa said, "it's true she could be—" "You know what's the saddest thing about kids whose mothers are mean to them? It's that even so, their

Independent? Bosh. That's just another word for selfish. It's stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.

mothers are the ones they hold their arms out to afterward for comfort. Isn't that pathetic?" "Elaine. Just move on," Willa said.

You almost died," a nurse told her. But that was nonsense. Of course she wouldn't have died; she had children. When you have children, you're obligated to live.

She felt guilty about Derek's death, too, because she should have known better than to bring up the sensitive subject of Ian while Derek was driving.

Just like his daddy, but his daddy wants Red to be different from him. Isn't that always how it is?