Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

52. “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? I never knew it was possible to think about someone all of the time, for someone to be always doing acrobatic leaps across your thoughts. Everything else was an unwelcome distraction from what I wanted to think about.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

53. “I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

54. “I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

55. “And as these words come, one after another, it is possible for him to slip away from himself and find a peace so absorbing, so soothing, so private, so joyous that nothing else will do.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

56. “And we forget because we must.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

57. “This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

58. “She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

59. “He has, Anges 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.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

60. “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

61. “I find,′ he says, his voice still muffled, ’that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That’s what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

62. “She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

63. “Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

64. “She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

65. “Hamnet wills that it is Judith that is to live.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

66. “She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realise that it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

67. “The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

68. “Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn’t change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied “Good” and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

69. “You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

70. “She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. 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

71. “He says again that he will not hurt her, she must not be scared, he will not hurt her, he will not, he promises, the words whispered in his new rasping voice. And then he hurts her anyway. The pain is startling, and curious in its specificity.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

72. “To lose your temper is to lose the battle.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

73. “She glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

74. “Isn’t it said that the household’s eldest daughter keeps a hawk?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

75. “And she looked up at me and it was as if she was waking from sleep. She stretched. She actually stretched and she said, hello, Kit. And then she must have seen that I was on the verge of tears because her face fell and she said, what is it? And I said, you. You are ruining my chances. And, you know, she said, chances of what? And I realised that if I were to successfully –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

76. “Is it possible for a woman to be so unsettled in spirit that a child will have no hope of taking root within her?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

77. “How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

78. “Agnes cannot help herself. She turns in her saddle and sees: drooping grey clouds pierced by long poles, shuddering in the breeze, topped by things that look, for a moment, like stones or turnips. She squints at them. They are blackened, ragged, oddly lumpish. They give off, to her, a thin, soundless wail, like trapped animals. Whatever can they be? Then she sees that the one nearest her seems to have a row of teeth set into it.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

79. “For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

80. “This is a different man, surely, from the one who ordered Contrari’s death. It cannot have been him. This is her husband, who loves her, or seems to; that was the ruler of Ferrara. They are the same man, they are different men, the same yet different.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

81. “Eleonora is a woman all too aware of her rarity and worth: she possesses not only a body able to produce a string of heirs, but also a beautiful face, with a forehead like carved ivory, eyes wide-set and deep brown, a mouth that looks well in both a smile and a pout. On top of all this, she has a quick and mercurial mind.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

82. “She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

83. “After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was ‘fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

84. “It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

85. “Gardens don’t stand still: they are always in flux.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

86. “She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strenght of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

87. “To ignore it is to drain it of its power.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

88. “Outside, the colours accost his eyes: the glancing lapis sky, the virulent green of the verge, the creamy blossoms of a tree, the pink kirtle of a woman leading a nag along the road.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

89. “What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

90. “She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

91. “Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has to outpace it.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

92. “Joan is altijd ontevreden en ze rust niet voordat een ander dat ook is. Het enige waar zij blij van wordt is andere mensen net zo ongelukkig maken als zij. Ze wil graag gezelschap in die ongelukkige ontevredenheid van haar.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

93. “He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

94. “There is so much to do in an family this size, so much to see, so many people needing so many differnt things. How easy is it, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until – what? Agnes doesn’t know.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

95. “Does the light still slant into my chamber in the evening, just before it disappears below the city’s roofs? Do you miss me? Even a little? Does anyone ever go and stand before my portrait?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

96. “A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

97. “A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

98. “The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

99. “It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. Which.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

100. “He breathes in. He breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the whorls of her ear; he breathes in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.”

— Maggie O'Farrell