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I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Love
Shoes
Think
Luck
Thinking
Word
Chance
Universe
Overheard
Change
Pebble
Littles
Pebbles
Little
Shoe

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I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.
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In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them
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People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
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I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.
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I don't want to say I hear voices well, actually I do hear voices, but I don't think it's supernatural. I think it's just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.
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I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
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Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.
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I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
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Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?
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Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.
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...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
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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.
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For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
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No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.
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People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.
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Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
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My stories are never quite good enough
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When I read, I'm purely a reader
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It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
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View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.
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