Top 40 Claire Keegan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

— Claire Keegan

2. “Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

— Claire Keegan

3. “I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”

— Claire Keegan

4. “The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.”

— Claire Keegan

5. “Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.”

— Claire Keegan

6. “My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.”

— Claire Keegan

7. “Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.”

— Claire Keegan

8. “There are tears there but she is too proud to blink and let one fall. If she blinked, he would take her hand and take her away from this place. This, at least, is what he tells himself. It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.”

— Claire Keegan

9. “It was a December of crows.”

— Claire Keegan

10. “It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed but she sometimes is.”

— Claire Keegan

11. “See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’ I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between. ‘Can you see it?’ he says. ‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’ And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.”

— Claire Keegan

12. “Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?”

— Claire Keegan

13. “This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted; it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone.”

— Claire Keegan

14. “He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can’t people stop talking and embrace each other?”

— Claire Keegan

15. “Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.”

— Claire Keegan

16. “The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass.”

— Claire Keegan

17. “It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”

— Claire Keegan

18. “Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.”

— Claire Keegan

19. “Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.”

— Claire Keegan

20. “It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper:.”

— Claire Keegan

21. “When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed, but he made himself carry on and crossed to a neighbour’s house, whose light was on.”

— Claire Keegan

22. “That’s the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t.”

— Claire Keegan

23. “People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.”

— Claire Keegan

24. “Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”

— Claire Keegan

25. “Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming.”

— Claire Keegan

26. “He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.”

— Claire Keegan

27. “The next year, when he’d won first prize for spelling and was given a wooden pencil-case whose sliding top doubled as a ruler, Mrs Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. ‘You’re a credit to yourself,’ she’d told him. And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child.”

— Claire Keegan

28. “At first, I struggled with some of the bigger words, but Kinsella kept his fingernail under each, patiently, until I guessed it or half-guessed it and then I did this by myself until I no longer needed to guess, and read on. It was like learning to ride the bike; I felt myself taking off, the freedom of going places I couldn’t have gone before, and it was easy.”

— Claire Keegan

29. “How still it was up here but why was it not ever peaceful?”

— Claire Keegan

30. “It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.”

— Claire Keegan

31. “What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”

— Claire Keegan

32. “Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.”

— Claire Keegan

33. “Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.”

— Claire Keegan

34. “As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”

— Claire Keegan

35. “What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things.”

— Claire Keegan

36. “It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.”

— Claire Keegan

37. “Plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me.”

— Claire Keegan

38. “Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing Christmas with his wife and daughters so much as on tomorrow and who owed what, and how and when he’d deliver what was ordered and what man he’d leave to which task, and how and where he’d collect what was owed – and before tomorrow was coming to an end, he knew his mind would already be working in much the same way, yet again, over the day that was to follow.”

— Claire Keegan

39. “Eileen was fast asleep, and for a while he watched over her, feeling the need of her, letting his gaze idle over her bare shoulder, her open, sleeping hands, the soot-black darkness of her hair against the pillowslip. The longing to stay, to reach out and touch her was deep, but he took his shirt and trousers from the chair and dressed in the dark, without her waking.”

— Claire Keegan

40. “She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’ As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.”

— Claire Keegan