Top 200 Anne Tyler Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next.”

— Anne Tyler

152. “I think if you knew them well enough, if you’d listened to them closely enough while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now. So the smart thing to do is, pay attention while they’re living.”

— Anne Tyler

153. “It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.”

— Anne Tyler

154. “But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.”

— Anne Tyler

155. “None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life – motherhood, middle age, etc. – often influence my subject matter.”

— Anne Tyler

156. “That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.”

— Anne Tyler

157. “She has. No. Plan.”

— Anne Tyler

158. “When I’m working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.”

— Anne Tyler

159. “She walked to work every day feeling starkly, conspicuously alone. It seemed that everyone else on the street had someone to keep them company, someone to laugh with and confide in and nudge in the ribs. All those packs of young girls who’d already figured everything out.”

— Anne Tyler

160. “Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!”

— Anne Tyler

161. “Peter sometimes claimed – jokingly, she assumed – that the whole country should keep its clocks set to the same hour, even though that meant that some states would have to conduct their business in the dark.”

— Anne Tyler

162. “French Braid reveals the gentle realities of family ties that constrict and those that fall apart altogether, while the daily hum of diligence and possibility reverberates in the background.”

— Anne Tyler

163. “When I read, I’m purely a reader.”

— Anne Tyler

164. “I’m a roomful of broken hearts.”

— Anne Tyler

165. “And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it’s not supposed to be.”

— Anne Tyler

166. “I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.”

— Anne Tyler

167. “Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.”

— Anne Tyler

168. “I’ve always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.”

— Anne Tyler

169. “My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.”

— Anne Tyler

170. “I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.”

— Anne Tyler

171. “Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn’t forced themselves to mess it up?”

— Anne Tyler

172. “The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.”

— Anne Tyler

173. “So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person’s life, once that person had children.”

— Anne Tyler

174. “It is the language, maybe?” he asked. “I know the vocabulary, but still I am not capable to work the language the way I want to. There is no special word for ‘you’ when it is you that I am speaking to. In English there is only one ‘you,’ and I have to say the same ‘you’ to you that I would say to a stranger; I cannot express my closeness.”

— Anne Tyler

175. “Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely.”

— Anne Tyler

176. “As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing – the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest.”

— Anne Tyler

177. “Morris. Mercy filed the name in her memory. So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person’s life, once that person had children.”

— Anne Tyler

178. “Sometimes people live first one life and then another life,” her grandmother said. “First a family life and then later a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing.”

— Anne Tyler

179. “Never wear backless shoes for a social occasion.”

— Anne Tyler

180. “He must have some Tartar in him, don’t you think?” “I have no idea,” Kate said. “Or is it ‘Tatar.”

— Anne Tyler

181. “He’s fully aware that old age will be coming for him too, in time. Health troubles, insurance issues, all with no hope of a pension. Even now, in his forties, he has started to feel slightly less trustful of his own body. He takes more care about how he lifts things, and he gets winded sooner on his runs. A long-ago basketball injury tends to set up a kind of echo in his left ankle during sudden changes in the weather.”

— Anne Tyler

182. “In the living room, sectional couches lumbered through the vast space like a herd of rhinos, and both coffee tables were the size of double beds.”

— Anne Tyler

183. “Her grandmother laughed. “Oh, hon,” she said, “it’s never wise to look over your shoulder.” “Huh?” “Just run the race on your own, I say. Don’t fret about the others.” This didn’t make sense, for a moment, but then it did. Candle felt as if she’d had some burden lifted from her, and she gave Mercy a grateful smile and Mercy smiled back.”

— Anne Tyler

184. “Kate said, “Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

— Anne Tyler

185. “The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from.”

— Anne Tyler

186. “Because if you’re going to do someone a favor, her father used to tell her, you might as well do it graciously.”

— Anne Tyler

187. “He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.”

— Anne Tyler

188. “The child didn’t wake. She only nestled closer and sighed. So after all, Ezra could have put his coat beneath her head. He had missed an opportunity. It was like missing a train – or something more important, something that would never come again. There was no explanation for the grief that suddenly filled him.”

— Anne Tyler

189. “It was typical of him that he lacked the taste to make a final exit. He spent too long at his farewells, chatting in the doorway, letting in the cold.”

— Anne Tyler

190. “She had no patience with foreign accents.”

— Anne Tyler

191. “Kate wondered why they were both contemplating careers they were so unsuited for.”

— Anne Tyler

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

— Anne Tyler

193. “I’ll lose all my funding and I’ll have to close the lab and drive a taxi for a living.” “Heaven forbid!” Uncle Theron said in real horror, and Bunny said, “You’re going to make me drop out of school and get a job, aren’t you. You’re going to make me go to work serving raw bloody sirloins in some steakhouse.” Kate wondered why they were both contemplating careers they were so unsuited for.”

— Anne Tyler

194. “The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.”

— Anne Tyler

195. “It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.”

— Anne Tyler

196. “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.”

— Anne Tyler

197. “In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open.”

— Anne Tyler

198. “It’s never too late to do what you want to do.’ Remember that.”

— Anne Tyler

199. “People tended to be very spendthrift with their language, Kate had noticed. They used a lot more words than they needed to. She.”

— Anne Tyler

200. “Consider the gene pool,” she told him. “This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”

— Anne Tyler