Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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. “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

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

— 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. “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

107. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

112. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

117. “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

118. “The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite;.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

120. “The tigress didn’t so much pace as pour herself, as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

121. “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

122. “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

123. “He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

127. “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

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. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

136. “At the bottom of the steps, she turns to Iris, her face full of confusion. ‘They said it would be there. They promised they would put it in there for me.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ Iris says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. ‘I wanted it,’ she says. ‘I just wanted it. And they promised.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

137. “Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can’t avoid?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

138. “When she first came to New York she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips when they enter a room.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

139. “Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush? There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

140. “She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers – that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn’t occur to anyone here that they could stop you.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

141. “It has been drummed into her by physicians and priests alike that the character of a child is determined by the mother’s thoughts at the moment of conception.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

142. “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

143. “Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we’re not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn’t know this?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

144. “Agnes would like to tear it all down, rip it up, hurl it to the wind.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

145. “A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...”

— Maggie O'Farrell

146. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

148. “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

149. “What she has always dreaded is here. It has come.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

150. “There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell