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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have."

"He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him."

"What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth?... The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. "That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others--one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more."

"Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne."

"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."

"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."

"I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get"

"It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice."