Top 100 Anne Enright Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it’s really crazy difficult to think you’re doing it as a team and to find out that you’re not actually part of a team.”

— Anne Enright

52. “In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.”

— Anne Enright

53. “A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.”

— Anne Enright

54. “And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy – and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.”

— Anne Enright

55. “You write a book and you finish the book. That’s your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.”

— Anne Enright

56. “I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.”

— Anne Enright

57. “If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don’t know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.”

— Anne Enright

58. “My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don’t have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.”

— Anne Enright

59. “Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find – blood, nails, a bit of anguish.”

— Anne Enright

60. “People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you’re not sure where you’ll end up or how you are going to be, and you’re looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.”

— Anne Enright

61. “We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.”

— Anne Enright

62. “Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I’ve been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it’s quite nice.”

— Anne Enright

63. “Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.”

— Anne Enright

64. “One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised.”

— Anne Enright

65. “I can’t think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.”

— Anne Enright

66. “Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.”

— Anne Enright

67. “There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other’s tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity.”

— Anne Enright

68. “Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes one bewildered – which is the proper way to be.”

— Anne Enright

69. “I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There’s more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.”

— Anne Enright

70. “And dusk fell because it suited his skin.”

— Anne Enright

71. “The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it’s actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.”

— Anne Enright

72. “Dublin was a small town in those days, even the bullies were small, but the gossip was stupendous, and I know it wasn’t healthy but I do miss it. We have all got very disconnected since, which is to say, sane.”

— Anne Enright

73. “I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you’re not writing.”

— Anne Enright

74. “If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.”

— Anne Enright

75. “Because a mother’s love is God’s greatest joke.”

— Anne Enright

76. “It is not that the Hegartys don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.”

— Anne Enright

77. “But was talking aloud allowed?”

— Anne Enright

78. “I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.”

— Anne Enright

79. “We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.”

— Anne Enright

80. “A pair of swans above the lock, the waters pouring down into the pool below: the rightness of things restored me to my own proper desiring. I got up and walked back home very slowly, putting the right motives back in the right bodies. This is what Duggan did, this is what I did. This is what he wanted and knew, this is what I wanted. This is what I did not want. This is what I did not know. Also, the difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.”

— Anne Enright

81. “This is what remains. Magical objects with the magic gone out of them. A few cassettes and no tape machine on which they can be played.”

— Anne Enright

82. “He slept like a shout.”

— Anne Enright

83. “I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what’s happened.”

— Anne Enright

84. “I’ve heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. ‘The Gathering’ did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.”

— Anne Enright

85. “For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.”

— Anne Enright

86. “It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.”

— Anne Enright

87. “Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.”

— Anne Enright

88. “I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.”

— Anne Enright

89. “We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”

— Anne Enright

90. “Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.”

— Anne Enright

91. “When I’m working, I’m not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.”

— Anne Enright

92. “Just the way all mothers are crazy to their daughters, all mothers are wrong.”

— Anne Enright

93. “A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.”

— Anne Enright

94. “And this would be fine if he lived in any other town, but in Dublin every fool had a novel on the go, so he was, as Hughie Snell liked to endlessly repeat, ‘a eunuch in the great harem of Irish literature’.”

— Anne Enright

95. “If I am a fool, he said, Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.”

— Anne Enright

96. “I don’t blame him for anything now. Or not much. All of this will, in some form, happen to you. You will wake some morning and pat yourself down. You will realise that you think too much and live too little and that most people, men and women both, are mostly fine. You will love more easily and relinquish blame. At least I hope you will.”

— Anne Enright

97. “After three more years, she was released from the asylum, rattling with pills – a much reduced, soon to be terminally ill woman who was invisible, on the street, to those who passed her by.”

— Anne Enright

98. “Prithee Sirrah and Begorrah.”

— Anne Enright

99. “During the summers, she worked with the fit-ups.”

— Anne Enright

100. “And, by the way, we all consider sleeping with the bad man – we want to fix his hurt, or we want him to hurt us – one way or another, we are all attracted to the shadow.”

— Anne Enright