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
Anne TylerRead
And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how love complicates life, suggesting that without it, life could be simpler and cleaner.
Anne Tyler's quote suggests a duality in life where love is seen as both enriching and complicating. The speaker contemplates the simplicity of life without love, implying that while love brings depth and fulfillment, it also introduces challenges and emotional complexity that can make life feel less straightforward. This paradox highlights how integral love is to the human experience, as it can create both joy and struggle.
In practice
During a discussion about relationships and their challenges, this quote can illustrate how love adds complexity to our lives.
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 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.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns
I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
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.
There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
'Twas not my lips you kissed but my soul.
Why couldn't she have this, just enjoy this, without creating obstacles, digging up problems, worrying about mistakes, about tomorrow's? Why let the maybe's, the what if's, the probabilities spoil something so lovely?
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
I did not think I should be ever loved: do you indeed Love me so much as now you say you do? Ask of the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day: And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it.
A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.