“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. 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 hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. 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.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“The thing about caller ID is,” Red said, more or less to himself, “it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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 hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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. 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 of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“The trouble with dying is you don't get to stay around and see how everything turns out.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“She said, 'Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“If I know Mom,' she said, 'she'd have refused any surgery anyhow.'
'It's true,' Amanda said. 'Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“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. She”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler
Born place: in Minneapolis, Minnesota, The United States
Born date October 25, 1941
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“What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by in silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world, of another kind-- back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
“Falderson," he said quietly to Bahzell in passable Navahkan, "is as stupid as the day is long." He craned his neck to gaze up at the hradani and shook his head. "In fact, he's even stupider than I thought. You, sir, are the biggest damned hradani-no offense-I think I've ever seen.”
― David Weber, quote from Oath of Swords
“Soon, droves of children start to show up, keeping us rather busy. We start tallying up the number of Trolls, Batmans, Lego men, and princesses we see. The most popular costume? Batman and Superwoman with the fabrics and accessories varying from child to child. But my favorite so far is the girl who dressed as Little Debbie, but then again, I may be biased.
“I think she might be my new favorite,” Emma says as a little girl dressed as a nurse walks away.
“That’s because you’re a nurse, but you can’t play favorites,” I say, reminding Emma of the rules.
She levels with me. “This coming from the guy whose favorite child was dressed as Little Debbie.”
“Come on.” I lean back in my chair and motion to my head. “She had the rim of blue on her hat. That’s attention to detail.”
“And good fucking parenting,” Tucker chimes in, and we clink our beer bottles together.
Amelia chuckles next to me as Emma shakes her head. “Ridiculous. What about you, Amelia? What costume has been your favorite so far?”
“Hmm, it’s been a tough competition. There has been some real winning costumes and some absolute piss-poor ones.” She shakes her head. “Just because you put a scarf around your neck and call yourself Jack Frost doesn’t mean you dressed up.”
“Ugh, that costume was dumb.”
“It shouldn’t be referred to as a costume, but that’s beside the point.” I like how much Amelia is getting into this little pretend competition. She’s a far cry from the girl who first came home earlier. I love that having Tucker and Emma over has given me more time with Amelia, getting to know the woman she is today, but also managed to put that beautiful smile back on her face.
“So who takes the cake for you?” I ask, nudging her leg with mine.
Smiling up at me, she says, “Hands down it’s the little boy who dressed as Dwight Schrute from The Office. I think I giggled for five minutes straight after he left. That costume was spot on.”
“Oh shit, you’re right,” I reply as Emma and Tucker agree with me. “He even had the watch calculator.”
“And the small nose Dwight always complains about.” Emma chuckles. “Yeah, he has to be the winner.”
“Now, now, now, let’s not get too hasty. Little Debbie is still in the running,” Tucker points out.
Amelia leans forward, seeming incredibly comfortable, and says, “There is no way Little Debbie beats Dwight. Sorry, dude.”
The shocked look on Tucker’s face is comical. He’s just been put in his place and the old Amelia has returned.
I fucking love it.”
― Meghan Quinn, quote from The Other Brother
“The penalties incurred for the mistakes you made had to be paid out in full to the members of your family.”
― Min Jin Lee, quote from Pachinko
“It was a peaceful, unassuming life scored by birds in the morning and crickets in the evening, and because it was precious to us, we handled it with care.”
― Ruth Emmie Lang, quote from Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
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