Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

2. “We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

3. “Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

4. “Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

5. “In any fairy-tale, getting what you wish for comes at a cost. There is always a codicil, an addendum to the granting of a wish. There is always a price to pay.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

6. “We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

7. “Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that ‘Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.’1.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

8. “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

9. “That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

10. “The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

11. “You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

12. “The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

13. “We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

14. “It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn’t think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

15. “He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

16. “The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

17. “What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

18. “Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

19. “And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

20. “She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she’s been absorbed in.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

21. “He thinks of his grief over his sister as an entity that is horribly and painfully attached to him, the way a jellyfish might adhere to your skin or a goitre or an abscess. He pictures it as viscid, amorphous, spiked, hideous to behold. He finds it unbelievable that no one else can see it. Don’t mind that, he would say, it’s just my grief. Please ignore it and carry on with what you were saying.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

22. “What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

23. “Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

24. “She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

25. “She has always cried such enormous tears, like heavy pearls, quite at odds with the slightness of her frame.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

26. “In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

27. “And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

28. “What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

29. “That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

30. “All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant – the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

31. “I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, where i can find it.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

32. “She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.” He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. “She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.” He glances at Eliza. “Those are rare qualities, are they not?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

33. “She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

34. “Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

35. “Did my daughter appear to me a decade and a half before she was born? I like to think so. There she was, looping back through time to brush past a person not yet ready to be her mother – nowhere near ready, if I’m honest – tipping me the wink that she would one day arrive in my life. Readying me, perhaps, for the road ahead, sowing the seeds for all the strength, compassion and resilience required for her existence.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

36. “She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

37. “She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

38. “Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

39. “I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’ ‘Like me?’ ‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’ She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

40. “When you’re a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

41. “Why isn’t life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

42. “To me, tea taste like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

43. “Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o’clock, and the dual personality of the city’s main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

44. “If she was liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her; if she was a pill, she would down her’; if she was a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

45. “But there is nothing. A high whine of nothing, like the absence of noise when a church bell falls silent.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

46. “Do you think, Daniel,” she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, “that we might have reached the end of our story?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

47. “Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

48. “To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

49. “He is momentarily filled with a kind of pity for his son. What a task lies ahead of him: to learn literally everything.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

50. “He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free.”

— Maggie O'Farrell