The Amateur Marriage Quotes
"An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life."
"Tyler straddles expertly the line between commercial and literary fiction, so that her characters and their circumstances appeal for the widest possible audience."
"Tyler once again displays the qualities of wisdom, insightful writing and compassion that have made the Baltimore resident the most-admired serious yet popular writer working today."
"Unlike many writers treading similar ground, Tyler does not sneer at such domestic heartache, nor does she infuse it with gothic doom."
"Tyler is an unsurpassed commentator on the subtle entanglements of relationships."
"A wonderful character study illustrating the problems that, to some degree, afflict every marriage."
"With piercing psychology, gentle humor, and poignant understanding of how deeply people who can love each other hurt each other, Ms. Tyler sets her story against quick evocative sketches of the decades as they pass."
"It is Tyler’s particular genius to capture life at its most mundane, then redeem it with a poignant humanity."
"Tyler has once again shown us our limits, along with our capacity for transcending them."
"The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler’s immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career."
"You couldn’t raise a child in chaos and then expect her to view the world as a stable, secure place."
"He wrote her 'I’m making myself sick over you' and 'I really don’t think I could live without you'—lines that sounded extreme, he knew, but every word was painfully, absolutely true."
"The only mistake, Michael knew, was that he’d been wounded rather than killed."
"Seeing his mother giggle before, not even when his father and his brother were alive."
"A gap at one corner of the stitched-on mouth turned its smile into a lopsided grin."
"She was a rememberer and a saver and a compulsive souvenir keeper."
"She knew the level of voice they preferred—higher-pitched but not shrill."
"He experienced Pauline’s absence as a torn feeling deep inside him."
"They simply never should have married each other."
"The real problem was that they were mismatched."
"She had steadily, stubbornly, pigheadedly continued pursuing the wrong course."
"In public situations he stayed rigid with anxiety, every one of his muscles tensed, willing Danny’s muscles not to fail."
"She was the household’s spark and color, the spunky one, the adventurer."
"Sometimes the police detective phoned... 'Just touching base; nothing much to report.'"
"It seemed to him that maybe now, at long last, their family could be happy."
"The thought of her clouded every day. It meant that Michael never again had a moment of pure joy."
"‘Mrs. Anton,’ he said—‘Mrs. Anton!’ Can you imagine?—‘I believe your daughter Linnet’s in San Francisco and you should phone this number.’"
"Oh, goodness, no! She does have a certain hour to be home. And it isn’t just boys. Is it, Karen? No, there are other girls, too, of course. This is a group, officer; an ordinary group of boys and girls together. It isn’t only boys."
"But it already has been! Or just about. She left in the middle of supper. Now it’s past four the next day!"
"‘We’ll have to have a talk with her,’ their father said."
"Walking a small child was like herding water."
"It’s all, all, all right, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine now."
"We’re going to take you where Grandma and Grandpa are staying! Going to give you a bath, change you into clean clothes…"
"‘So I guess you must go to school,’ Pauline was saying."
"I thought, Why, yes, I could go, couldn't I? There's an idea! It came to me like the lifting of a burden."
"I worry I'll go to hell when I die," he said almost too low to be heard.
"It seems like such a waste to go on being wretched together. Better late than never, as my mother used to say."
"It wasn't what you said," he told her. "It was how I felt when you said it."
"When you said 'Go,' I felt freed," he said. "I thought, Why, yes, I could go, couldn't I? There's an idea!"
"I lie there and then I start thinking," he said.
"It's not so hard. Really I've gotten past all that. Well, I'd be pretty bad off if I hadn't! I've moved on. I'm not going to waste my energy nursing grudges."
"Words once said could not be unsaid; deeds could not be undone."
"She wasn’t like some people, who could toss away the past without a backward glance."
"The world won’t end if we fail to get together every single evening!"
"You have the most amazing luck finding men, Poll."
"It's funny, though, that her closest friends were people from the St. Cassian stage of her life."
"It never failed to amaze her that she was sixty-four years old now."
"Things were never the way they seemed from outside."
"Some men just wanted people to keep all their feelings bottled up and festering."
"This was such a big planet and she was drifting about on it, entirely unprotected!"
"Just a single perfect rose for me, please, Father."
"He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller."
"In the end, everyone dropped away, and someday it would be Michael’s turn even if he half fancied that he would go on forever."
"This will be the first whole day I’ve lived on the planet without her, he had thought when he woke the next morning."
"He knew that he and she had been unhappy together, but now he couldn’t remember why."
"You were ice and she was glass," Lindy had told him recently, "Two oddly similar substances, come to think of it—and both of them hell on your children."
"We did the best we could. We did our darnedest. We were just unskilled; we never quite got the hang of things. It wasn’t for lack of trying."
"He could almost pretend to himself that Pauline had still been alive all this time, pursuing her own routine in her own corner of the world."
"Is it you? It’s you! It’s really and truly you!" she would cry, and her face would light up with joy."
"I always think I know how a book will end, but often I’m wrong."
"Characters can say the most startling things, things I never dreamed of, and often that will send the plot in a whole new direction."