Top 200 Anne Tyler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.”

— Anne Tyler

52. “There’s surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I’m writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.”

— Anne Tyler

53. “I always think it’s a good sign when a man likes cats. It shows he doesn’t feel the need to be in constant control of things.”

— Anne Tyler

54. “Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there’s nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.”

— Anne Tyler

55. “I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.”

— Anne Tyler

56. “The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.”

— Anne Tyler

57. “She had tried her best to be a good mother – which to her meant a predictable mother. 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.”

— Anne Tyler

58. “You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough.”

— Anne Tyler

59. “Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.”

— Anne Tyler

60. “How plotless real life was!”

— Anne Tyler

61. “Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I’m going to have to think about how it will affect other people.”

— Anne Tyler

62. “For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.”

— Anne Tyler

63. “Past is past... no it’s not! People are always fond of saying that, but what’s past is never past; not entirely.”

— Anne Tyler

64. “I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?”

— Anne Tyler

65. “Never, ever, under any circumstances apply lipstick while at the table.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

67. “Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.”

— Anne Tyler

68. “She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.”

— Anne Tyler

69. “You think we’re a family,′ Cody said, turning back. ‘You think we’re some jolly, situation-comedy family when we’re in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.”

— Anne Tyler

70. “Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.”

— Anne Tyler

71. “I don’t want to say I hear voices; well, actually I do hear voices, but I don’t think it’s supernatural. I think it’s just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.”

— Anne Tyler

72. “It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream.”

— Anne Tyler

73. “Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine – what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.”

— Anne Tyler

74. “We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.”

— Anne Tyler

75. “He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.”

— Anne Tyler

76. “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

77. “This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.”

— Anne Tyler

78. “She said, ‘Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.”

— Anne Tyler

79. “My family can always tell when I’m well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.”

— Anne Tyler

80. “You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child – whichever one is unhappy.”

— Anne Tyler

81. “One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?”

— Anne Tyler

82. “Just because we’re related doesn’t mean we are any good at understanding each other.”

— Anne Tyler

83. “I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get.”

— Anne Tyler

84. “Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.”

— Anne Tyler

85. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

86. “The trouble with dying is you don’t get to stay around and see how everything turns out.”

— Anne Tyler

87. “I wonder how many times we dream that kind of dream-something strange and illogical-and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.”

— Anne Tyler

88. “You didn’t think I was so great anymore,” she said. “You started finding fault with all I said; you looked bored when I was talking; you acted like everyone else in the room was more important than I was. You had stopped properly valuing me.”

— Anne Tyler

89. “But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.”

— Anne Tyler

90. “I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.”

— Anne Tyler

91. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

92. “But what I hope for from a book – either one that I write or one that I read – is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don’t want to think of the writer.”

— Anne Tyler

93. “Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.”

— Anne Tyler

94. “He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.”

— Anne Tyler

95. “Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.”

— Anne Tyler

96. “I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won’t have to wonder about my characters ever again.”

— Anne Tyler

97. “The thing about caller ID is,” Red said, more or less to himself, “it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.”

— Anne Tyler

98. “It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

— Anne Tyler

99. “To my earlier self I would like to say, “Relax. The story will come in due time. Trust your characters. Let them tell you what happens next.”

— Anne Tyler

100. “If her time had been her own, she would have worked in the garden. That always soothed her spirits.”

— Anne Tyler