Top 200 Anne Tyler Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

102. “She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.”

— Anne Tyler

103. “Isn’t a memorial service meant to comfort the living?”

— Anne Tyler

104. “But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl.”

— Anne Tyler

105. “She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded – how empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom. What on earth had happened to her?”

— Anne Tyler

106. “Houses need humans,” Red said. “You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear – scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such – but that’s nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It’s like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground.”

— Anne Tyler

107. “Is still ridiculous,” Pyotr said. “Is so American, subtracting foods! Other countries, when they want healthiness they add foods in. Americans subtract them.”

— Anne Tyler

108. “I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.”

— Anne Tyler

109. “I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I’m living that story, and I don’t give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.”

— Anne Tyler

110. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

111. “I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble – some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves – but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.”

— Anne Tyler

112. “My writing day has grown shorter as I’ve aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.”

— Anne Tyler

113. “He was impressed that someone so old still wanted so fiercely to live.”

— Anne Tyler

114. “Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.”

— Anne Tyler

115. “Sometimes Willa felt she’d spent half her life apologizing for some man’s behavior. More than half her life, actually. First Derek and then Peter, forever charging ahead while Willa trailed behind picking up the pieces and excusing and explaining.”

— Anne Tyler

116. “Justine’s childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust.”

— Anne Tyler

117. “The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.”

— Anne Tyler

118. “Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there’s such a thing as dying.”

— Anne Tyler

119. “In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.”

— Anne Tyler

120. “The real adventure, he thought, is the flow of time; it’s as much adventure as anyone could wish.”

— Anne Tyler

121. “My stories are never quite good enough.”

— Anne Tyler

122. “Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables...”

— Anne Tyler

123. “Peculiar, isn’t it?” he said. “First you’re scolding your children and then all at once they’re so smart they’re scolding you.”

— Anne Tyler

124. “Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her. She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought. She should have made a few friends or joined a club. But she wasn’t the type. It wouldn’t have consoled her.”

— Anne Tyler

125. “I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”

— Anne Tyler

126. “And all at once I had no one to trade looks with.”

— Anne Tyler

127. “She collected and polished resentments as if it were some kind of hobby.”

— Anne Tyler

128. “Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.”

— Anne Tyler

129. “I didn’t really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.”

— Anne Tyler

130. “It was beginning to get a bit cooler out, thank heaven. One thing she was never going to adjust to was how you needed constant air conditioning here. People were dependent upon it in the same way that space travelers were dependent upon their oxygen tanks. It seemed possible that if the electricity went off, they could actually die. When Willa thought about that too long, it made her feel kind of panicky.”

— Anne Tyler

131. “Of course it seemed strange without Peter, but at least she could stay out as long as she liked without worrying she was neglecting him.”

— Anne Tyler

132. “It wasn’t what you said”, he told her.“It was how I felt when you said it”.”

— Anne Tyler

133. “Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.”

— Anne Tyler

134. “People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper baskets; they stepped on their own skirts.”

— Anne Tyler

135. “During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I have saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event ans it sort of levels out, so to speak – settles into the general landscape.”

— Anne Tyler

136. “I’m too shy for personal appearances, and I’ve found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can’t do any writing for many weeks afterward.”

— Anne Tyler

137. “Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.”

— Anne Tyler

138. “What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”

— Anne Tyler

139. “You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?”

— Anne Tyler

140. “She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work. from Back When We Were Grownups.”

— Anne Tyler

141. “The disappointments seemed to escape the family’s notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. 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.”

— Anne Tyler

142. “Liam really enjoyed a good movie. He found it restful to watch people’s conversations without being expected to join in. But he always felt sort of lonesome if he didn’t have someone next to him to nudge in the ribs at the good parts.”

— Anne Tyler

143. “People who hadn’t suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.”

— Anne Tyler

144. “Why Americans always begin inch by inch with what they say?”

— Anne Tyler

145. “On weekends, she had once told us, she liked to go to Stebbins hardware and ask the gray-haired men who clerked there how to fix a sagging door, or what to do about a curling wallpaper seam. She really did need their advice, she said; but also, she found it a comfort. It took her back to the time when her father was alive.”

— Anne Tyler

146. “Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.”

— Anne Tyler

147. “The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character’s self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I’m sorry I don’t get to pick and choose.”

— Anne Tyler

148. “I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it...”

— Anne Tyler

149. “I spend about a year between novels.”

— Anne Tyler

150. “It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.”

— Anne Tyler