Quotes from Anne Tyler

We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then.

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 her feel sort of naïve and inexperienced. He often addressed her as

See... what it was, I guess: it was the grayness; grayness of things; half-right-and-half-wrongness of things. Everything tangled, mingled, not perfect any more. I couldn't take that. Your mother could, but not me. Yes sir, I have to hand it to your mother.

There's my downfall, son. I mean with anyone, any one of these lady friends, I just can't resist a person I make happy.

When she was showering that night she examined her right side for a bruise, but there wasn't one.

O dead one, why did you die in the springtime? You haven't yet tasted the squash, or the cucumber salad.

her sister's snuffly breaths across the room. Okay, then: think of Derek's proposal. He had no idea how much he'd asked of her, suggesting she give up her work with Dr. Brogan. The discovery of language had been her great epiphany in college.

She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella.

There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

Who would have thought," the witch had asked, "that a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?

Mothers hate beards.

His style of dress went way beyond your usual adolescent grunge: old men's overcoats bought at flea markets; crusty, baggy tweed pants; sneakers held together with duct tape.

crinolines. You'd see the other girls wafting

He was like anybody else, Red said. Insufferable and likeable. Bad and good.

The trouble with dying," she'd told Jeannie once, "is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending." "But, Mom, there is no ending," Jeannie said. "Well, I know that," Abby said. In theory.

See, I've always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you. I keep asking myself: couldn't Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?

What I do like listening to as I write is the sound of ordinary life out in the street—children playing and workmen talking.

About your son, she seemed to be saying: Just put your hand here. I'm scared, too. We're all scared. You're not the only one.

And that's where he and I differed, Poppy said. Because I was always telling him, 'Look,' I said. 'Face it,' I said. 'There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got,' I said.

He was like anybody else, Red said. Insufferable and likable. Bad and good.

Who said, 'You're only ever as happy as your least happy child?

I'm just saying a person can be too understanding," he said. "Too sympathizing and pitying, like. Getting into a kid's private brain." "There is no such thing as 'too understanding.' Ã¢â'¬Â "Well, count on a social worker to think that.

Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating—attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn't quite put her finger on. And