Quotes from Anne Tyler

You can never take it for granted that family members will like each other.

I will make myself count to ten before I speak to the children in anger

I always say that the way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.

turned out that Elaine was so cool and sensible that she arranged to arrive the night before the funeral and fly out right afterward. Willa wasn't happy about that. Still, she had to admit that her literal request had been for Elaine to come to the funeral, period. Oh, they were never going to be like the sisters in Little Women!

But Nora had said, "Oh, no. I don't believe in dative evangelizing." Abby had repeated this later to the girls: "She doesn't believe in 'dative evangelizing.

should join in on "Shall We Gather at

He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

couldn't tell her then. It would have been adding insult to injury. It would be, first the main dish is a flop and then her husband abandons her, all in the same evening. Right?

She had promised herself that her children would never have to worry what sort of mood she was in; they would never peek into her bedroom in the morning to see how their day was going to go. She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.

just meant I had to get up the next morning and tell Denise, 'Don't fix any breakfast for me; I'm moving out

In her skirted pinkswimsuit, her plump shoulders glistening with suntan lotion and her legs lightly dusted with sand, she looked something like a cupcake. She hadn't ventured into the water at all so far, and neither had Red. In fact, Red was wearing his work shoes and dark socks. Evidently this was the year when the two of them were declaring themselves to be officially old.

Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately. "What are you thinking about?" she liked to say, and "Tell me what you honestly feel.

Of course. We go around and around in this world, and here we go again.

house, no bigger than a box of notecards. The

Sometimes, she said, it seems to me there's just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over.

God," he said. "I come here to say I feel bad about your husband, and listen to me, yakking about my own little troubles." "I wouldn't call divorce a little trouble," Willa said.

Every place I go I miss another place.

See this? And this? See me somersault? See me pull my wagon?" His smallness colored every act; he was conscious of a desperate need to learn to manage, to take charge of his surroundings. Waking

that the quality you marry a person for will end up being what you hate them for, most often.

It's just free speech, that's all we've got. We can say whatever we like, then the government goes and does exactly what it pleases. You call that democracy? It's like we're on a ship, headed someplace terrible, and somebody else is steering and the passengers can't jump off.

Seems like you are always loving the people that fly away from you, Ben Joe, and flying away from the people that love you.

If she was easily swayed, she thought, at least she had chosen who would sway her. If she was locked in a pattern, at least she had chosen what that pattern would be. She felt strong and free and definite.

If we had been any different, would they have loved us?

She seemed to have fallen in love again. In love with her own husband! The convenience of it pleased her—like finding right in her pantry all the fixings she needed for a new recipe.