Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

103. “I am the only tea abstainer in my family. I think they regard this as a baffling perversion. To me, tea tastes like dried lawn clippings, diluted leaf mold, watered down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. I have never been able to stomach it.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

104. “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

105. “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

106. “The witching hour,” Daniel always called this time of day. He used to go out in it, every evening, and have a last cigarette as he walked the perimeter of the garden. He liked the moment, he said, when it was neither day nor night, but indefinably both.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

107. “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

108. “She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She can not leave him here.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

109. “In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

110. “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

111. “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

112. “Hamnet learns quickly, can recite by rote, but he will not keep his mind on his.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

113. “How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

114. “You said.’ Esme shuts her eyes, screws them up tight, bowing her head. ‘You promised,’ she says, almost inaudibly and, with her hands, she is crushing the material of her dress.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

115. “She doesn’t like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

116. “Whoever it used to belong to wishes her.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

117. “Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

118. “She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

119. “The Irish are good in a crisis, Michael Francis thinks, as he eases back the clingfilm on a tray of sandwiches his aunt Bridie has left in the kitchen. They know what to do, what traditions must be observed; they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news: in murmurs, with shakes of the head, their accents wrapping themselves around the syllables of misfortune. A.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

120. “Esme began playing the game she often played with herself at times like this, looking over the room and working out how she might get round it without touching the floor. She could climb from the sofa to the low table and, from there, to the fender stool. Along that and then –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

121. “There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

122. “It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father’s gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

123. “When you engender a life, you open yourself to risk, to fear. Holding my child, I realised my vulnerability to death: I was frightened of it, for the first time. I knew all too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

124. “It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

125. “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

126. “Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

128. “Not for the first time, it strikes her that she will never feel that again, that it is an experience now closed to her, at her age, at her stage in life. The loss of that possibility sears her sometimes: it is hard for a woman to let go of; harder still if another woman in your household is just entering that state. The sight of this girl’s stomach, every time, makes Mary think of the emptiness, the quiet of her own.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

129. “Mother said that no parent in their right mind would display a portrait like that. Esme was not at all contrite. The chair was so uncomfortable, she said, there were two springs digging into my leg. She was funny like that, always so ridiculously oversensitive. She was like that princess in the story about the pea and all the mattresses. Is there a pea, I would say to her when she thrashed about in the bed at night, trying to get comfortable, and she would say, whole pods of them.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

130. “It may be tonight, in the deepest dark, because that is the most dangerous time for the sick.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

131. “May I keep this?” It was not a question. He was already turning away, placing her miniature painting inside his leather book and tying the straps, so that the bird could never fly away again, even if it had lived.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

132. “The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite; she carried on her body the barred marks of a prison, as if she had been branded for exactly this, as if captivity had been her destiny all along.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

133. “The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories. I’d been a parent for about ten minutes when I met the man, but he taught me, with a small gesture, one of the most important things about the job: kindness, intuition, touch, and that sometimes you don’t even need words.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

134. “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

135. “Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

136. “The smell of his grandparents’ home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

137. “Her dress was strange: she wouldn’t have the organdie, she wanted red, she said, crimson was the word she used. Velvet. I will have a crimson velvet, she said to Mrs Mac as she stood at the fire. You will not, Mother said from the sofa, you are the granddaughter of an advocate, not a saloon girl, and she was paying, you see, so Esme had to settle for a kind of burgundy taffeta. Wine, Mrs Mac called it, which I think made her feel.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

138. “That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

139. “It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine – perhaps to a fault – about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn’t scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

140. “How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

141. “Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

142. “If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds. He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

143. “Please.’ Esme stood. She clasped her hands together to keep them still. ‘Miss Murray says I could get a scholarship and after that perhaps university and – ’ ‘There would be no profit in it,’ her father said, as he settled himself back into his armchair. My daughters will not work for a living.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

144. “She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

145. “She has created this moment – no one else – and yet, now it is happening, she finds that it is entirely at odds with what she desires. What she desires is for him to stay at her side, for his hand to remain in hers. For him to be there, in the house, when she brings this baby into the world. For them to be together.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

146. “She wouldn’t let them take Hugo. They had to prise him from her. It took her father and a man they’d got from somewhere. Her mother stood by the window until it was all over.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

147. “There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

148. “She sees the cloud above him grow darker, gather its horrible rank strength. She wants to reach across the table then, to lay her hand on his arm. She wants to say, I am here. But what if her words are not enough? What if she is not enough of a salve for his nameless pain? For the first.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

149. “She cannot imagine how it might be, to see him again. He would be a child and she is now grown, almost a woman. What would he think? Would he recognise her now, if he were to pass her in the street, this boy who will for ever remain a boy? Several.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

150. “You see, she says to him, you cannot change what you are given, cannot bend or alter what is dealt to you.”

— Maggie O'Farrell