Quotes from Anne Tyler

those who forget the past tend to regret the future

She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges

Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.

She wished she had had a mother. Well, she had had a mother, but she wished she'd had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.

It seemed they viewed her differently now. She had status. She mattered. All at once they were interested in what she had to say. She hadn't fully understood that before this, she hadn't mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified. And also fraudulent. It was confusing.

Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ...

There was a certain liberation in talking to a man who didn't have a full grasp of English. She could tell him anything and half of it would fly right past him, especially if the words came tumbling out fast enough

I'm worried if I come too close, they'll say I'm overstepping. They'll say I'm pushy, or … emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don't care. I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day. There's this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.

Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with Frankly,' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes.

So maybe parenthood was meant to be educational, Robin thought—a lesson for the parents on totally other styles of being.

The trouble with dying is you don't get to stay around and see how everything turns out.

when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I

Now she settled into the dailiness of grief—not that first piercing stab but the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence.

Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air - something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.

flibbertigibbet.

Skinny as a fence post.

In a way," I told Peggy, "it's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are Ã¢â'¬Â¦ muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and—whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that will ever change.

I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn't only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you're not quite so wholly there in the new relationship.

Hi Kate! We went to get marriage license! Who's we? Your Father and I. Well I hope you'll be very happy together.

apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.

You would think this realization would come as a relief to him. And it did, in part. He felt a rush of love for his whole family, whom it seemed he had underestimated. He had thought that guarding his secret was a kindness to them; he was protecting them from knowledge that would hurt them. But now he saw that not telling them had been more hurtful, and it was they who had been kind.