The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anne Tyler

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul – chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!

Pet, Greatest, Earth

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

Blood, My Own, Always

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.

Time, I Am, Old Age

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

Thought, Beginning, Look

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.

friends, family

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.

ghosts, inspirational-attitude, life

Don’t count on me to take you in because I’m angry. I’m angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad’s thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie’s baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

family-relationships, parenting, prodigal-son

The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them

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.

crush, description, hot, male-beauty, man

He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he’d heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.

feeling-of-weakness, feelings, hurt, love

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.

language, truth

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

international, life, past