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

102. “And now there is this – this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

103. “There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

111. “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

112. “He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

114. “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. “Go, then,” she says, turning from him, pushing him away, “if you are going. Return when you can.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

122. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “Odd that your life can contain such significant tripwires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

136. “You need a plan,” she hears – or seems to hear – her old nurse, Sofia, say, from a place near her elbow. “To lose your temper is to lose the battle.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

137. “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

138. “A cold fear rinses down through his chest, encasing his heart in an instant, crackling frost.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

139. “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

140. “I am also shouting at the top of my voice. There’s something about living in the middle of nowhere that invites this indulgence.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

141. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

143. “What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what’s going on, everything changes.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

144. “The people who applaud the loudest, Lucrezia notes, are the ones who talked through the performance.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

145. “Can you not just put the seat belt on?” I snap. I can’t help it. I have a low threshold for repetitive electronic noises.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

146. “Judith is whimpering, Susanna clutching her hand, so Agnes misses the moment, she misses seeing her son, the shroud see sewed for him, disappearing from view, entering the dark black river-sodden earth. It was there one moment, then she dipped her head to look at Judith and then it was gone. Never to be seen again.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

147. “The garden, Kitty, the boat, the minister, their grandmother, that handkerchief.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

148. “Together, they will see to the girl, lift down the pallet, give her the medicine. They will take this matter in hand.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

149. “I have lived a great deal of my life near the sea: I feel its pull, its absence, if I don’t visit it at regular intervals, if I don’t walk beside it, immerse myself in it, breathe its air. I take excursions to the coasts near London–the tea-coloured waves of Suffolk, the flat, silty sands of Essex, the pebbly inclines of Sussex. I have, ever since childhood, swum in it as often as I can, even in the coldest water.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

150. “Oh,’ she burst out. ‘I hate this – I hate it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Just – this. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m getting scared it might never come.”

— Maggie O'Farrell