Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

104. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

123. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

126. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

131. “And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

132. “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

133. “The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn’t think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez. ‘Ishbel,’ she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, ’something will have to be done about the clothes.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

134. “That had done it. Esme had turned at that one. She had snatched up the protractor of Catriona McFarlane, high priestess of the tittering club, and pointed it at her like a divining rod. ‘You know what you are, Catriona McFarlane?’ Esme had said. ‘You are a sad creature. You are mean-spirited, soulless. You are going to die alone and lonely. Do you hear me?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

135. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

137. “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

138. “Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There’s no knowing how he might choose to be with her.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

139. “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

140. “And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “The whole thing made Esme want to burst into honesty, to say, let’s forget this charade, do you want to marry her or not?”

— 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. “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

150. “We will hit the ocean or the ground at speed and we will explode like cans of soda.”

— Maggie O'Farrell