The Purdzilla Show

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell - in which case, who was "she"? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing. Anne Tyler (in Ladder Of Years )

Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke. Anne Tyler (in Celestial Navigation )

He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward. Anne Tyler (in Celestial Navigation )

It was September now and some nights the steam heat came on. The radiators warming up smelled dusty and bitter, the house seemed like an old person, all rattling bones and coughs and stale breaths. Anne Tyler (in Celestial Navigation )

Photo by ZEKERIYA SEN on Unsplash It was hot now, but she liked being hot. She felt she moved more smoothly in heat. The glaze of sweat on her face took her back to airless nights in Tehran, when she and her family slept on mattresses dragged up to the rooftop and you could look across the city and see all the other families arranging their mattresses on their rooftops, as if every house had split open to show the lives going on inside. And then at dawn the call to prayer would float them all up from their sleep. Anne Tyler (in Digging to America)

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash "And time," she would tell Dr. Wiss. "Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you're little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you're grown. Well, now it's just a blur. I can't keep track of it anymore! 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 (in A Spool Of Blue Thread )

DZHA on Unsplash "Sometimes," she said, "it seems to me there's just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over." Anne Tyler (in A Spool Of Blue Thread )