|
431ac2a
|
But still, you know how it is when you're missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family's house. "It's him!" you say. "He came! We knew he would; we always ..." But then you ..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
58e620c
|
I'll just tell you what I've learned that has helped me," he said. "Shall I?" "Yes, tell me," she said, growing still. "I broke my days into separate moments," he said. "See, it's true I didn't have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on T..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
f8205ce
|
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 |
|
7583f1d
|
She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actual..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
b4bf5cc
|
I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
007a3a2
|
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 |
|
1029bd7
|
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 |
|
704214e
|
I write because I want to have more than one life.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
963bcde
|
Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.
|
|
life
past
|
Anne Tyler |
|
9b24241
|
Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." "Yes, they would," Pyotr said mysteriously. He had been walking a couple of steps ahead of Kate, but now he dropped back and, without any warning, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. "But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl."
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
371d076
|
dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such?
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
72da232
|
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 |
|
34e2b37
|
You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of bein..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
b647fe3
|
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 |
|
015e174
|
This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some . I want to make sure you realize that.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
13889bb
|
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 |
|
c0235d8
|
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 |
|
d679257
|
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 |
|
0590142
|
It's hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that's bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don't dare show their true feelings. No matter if they're hurting or desperate or stricken with grief, if they're heartsick or they're homesick or some huge dark guilt is hanging over them or they're about to fail big-time at something--'Oh, I'm okay,' they say. 'Eve..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
7bf0456
|
I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
d31ac49
|
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 |
|
4aa9774
|
At this moment (letting a breeze ripple through her fingers like warm water), Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
dd01585
|
When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the "serving size" listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size...."
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
064fa3e
|
For me, writing was the only way out.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
a2cd838
|
Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven's sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was "cool" ("I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger," she had said), did she not realize that "cool" had been used in Abby's time, too, not to mention long before?"
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
7166bf9
|
She opened her eyes and studied him a moment. Then she slipped her hand in her pocket, come up with something and held it toward him - palming it, like a secret. "For you," she said. "For me?" "I'd like you to have it." It was a snapshot stolen from her family album: Muriel as a toddler, clambering out of a wading pool. She meant, he supposed, to give him the best of her. And so she had. But the best of her was not that cild's Shirley Tem..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
c51edd7
|
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. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon," she'd begin, and it would all come back to her--the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she'd barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure...
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
3815893
|
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 |
|
ceb9b62
|
Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination; Liam couldn't decide which.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
bff2eef
|
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 |
|
5003c49
|
Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food--to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people's lives. Couldn't you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food?
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
2419cbf
|
seven. seven was when ethan had learned to ride a bicycle. macon was visited by one of those memories that dent the skin, that strain the muscles. he felt the seat of ethan's bike pressing into his hand--the curled-under edge at the rear that you hold onto when you're trying to keep a bicycle upright. he felt the sidewalk slapping against his soles as he ran. he felt himself let go, slow to a walk, stop with his hands on his hips to call ou..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
93d0b45
|
What did Ethan care? _He_ had no trouble navigating. This was because he'd lived all his life in one house, was Macon's theory; while a person who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog -- adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.
|
|
geographic-dyslexia
|
Anne Tyler |
|
28e3555
|
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 |
|
5c1e134
|
Reading is the first to go," my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about."
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
61bfc0a
|
In my country they have proverb: 'Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.' " This was intriguing. Kate said, "Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
6440560
|
It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.
|
|
woundedness
|
Anne Tyler |
|
5afd6b4
|
She passed her 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.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
0a5fc7e
|
Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
ad757b7
|
When you come [to a baseball game] in person, you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don't have any choice but to accept it.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
fe3e425
|
I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me." "Well, sure she would! You're her own kind, right?" "I am her kind?" Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, "I mean you're in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?" he asked. "No normal person could understand you people." "What exactly do you find difficult to understand?" Dr. Battista asked him. "Oh, you know, a..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
bd85951
|
The little girls in Room 4 were playing breakup. The ballerina doll was breaking up with the sailor doll. "I'm sorry, John," she said in a brisk, businesslike voice--Jilly's voice, actually--"but I'm in love with somebody else." "Who?" the sailor doll asked. It was Emma G. who was speaking for him, holding him up by the waist of his little blue middy blouse. "I can't tell you who, on account of he's your best friend and so it would hurt you..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
fc36348
|
Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening up on that person out in public . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your bre..
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |
|
dcee61e
|
Disaster followed disaster... the hero stuck in there, though. Macon had long ago noticed that all adventure movies had the same moral: Perseverance pays. Just once he'd like to see a hero like himself -- not a quitter, but a man who did face facts and give up gracefully when pushing on was foolish.
|
|
|
Anne Tyler |