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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

106. “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

107. “The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

108. “She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

109. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

114. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

116. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

128. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

138. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “I have a theory,’ she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, ’that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

146. “It is a string of letters, written in a slanted fashion; the words seem to slide down the page, as if they weigh more at the end of the sentence than at the beginning. He bends to look.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

147. “Esme picks up woollen combinations and asks where they go in the baffling order of things. The shopgirl looks at their grandmother who shakes her head. ‘They are from the colonies,’ she says.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

148. “Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

149. “But his is a mind also easily distracted.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

150. “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