Quotes from Anne Tyler

it was all so new to her, he guessed.

And sometimes, he said, you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.

You want to be independent?" he asked. He pronounced the word at a distance, somehow, as if he found it distasteful.

she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

Let it be is the theme that dominates his existence. He sees himself as being ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of all his happiness and partly his undoing.

The trouble is I'm reversible. You're hardly alive if you're reversible as I am.......But the irreversible people' they get some place. Good or bad.

You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.

passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.

When does the time come when you stand in front of your grown-up woman's mirror and feel contentment for what you see? Ever?

We've lost the last remaining chick in our nest! It's natural we would feel low." And she did feel low; no question about it. In many ways David was the child closest to her heart, although she'd expected to feel closer to her girls. After Alice and Lily left home it was just David and his parents, and the chaos died down and sometimes Mercy was able to hold actual brief conversations with him.

What if marrying Shelley meant that she would end up just like him, unable to realize a thing's happening or a moment's passing? What if it were like a contagious disease, so that soon she would be wandering around in a daze and incapable of putting her finger on any given thing and saying, that is that?

narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end.

She had fallen into particles over the course of a single evening.

How come you pack your clothes in Kleenex?" she asked. Tissue paper, she meant. Willa said, "Oh, that's just something women do when they have too much time on their hands." Cheryl said "Huh?" and Willa laughed.

Or maybe it wasn't a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

Coming here had not been a mistake. Willa couldn't say exactly how she knew that, but she did.

Didn't it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking.

he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel.

It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time.

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it's almost certain nobody's ever asked him. On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in.

So let me just catch you up on what is going on here," Cheryl told her. "There's this bunch of total strangers, see, eating lunch in a hamburger joint. All these different people on their lunch break. And these space aliens come and kidnap them and take them off to study them, because they believe

you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this." "I thought you didn't want us to take sides." "No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say.

these people are a family. See? They want to learn how families work and that's what they think these customers are. Get it?" "Got it," Willa said.

You can't think later what the argument was about, even, but you know that things will be changed forever after.