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Book: The Beginner's Goodbye
Quotes of Book: The Beginner's Goodbye

Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn't only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening up on that person out in public . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
Reading is the first to go," my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the "serving size" listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size....
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some . I want to make sure you realize that.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I have saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event ans it sort of levels out, so to speak - settles into the general landscape.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
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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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
It's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that will ever change.
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Anne Tyler _ The Beginner's Goodbye
People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
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