Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

152. “And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

153. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

155. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

165. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

167. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

184. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

186. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

188. “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

189. “They turned into Lauder Road. The lamps had been lit, as they were at this time every day, and the lighter was passing on the other side of the street, his pole over his shoulder. Esme’s sight seemed to close in at the sides and she thought she might faint. ‘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.’ Kitty stopped and stared at her, perplexed. ‘What are you talking about?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

190. “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

191. “I think about the person I was in my mid 20′s. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

192. “What do you think, Father said, and I said, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and she was, she was –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

193. “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

194. “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

195. “That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

196. “When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

197. “She thinks fleetingly of the costly bracelet, which she has since covered with ashes and bone fragments, wrapped in hide, and buried by the henhouse.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

198. “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

199. “So it follows, of course, that she will be here now, in whatever form she can manage. Agnes does not need to turn her head, does not want to frighten her away. It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

200. “He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He.”

— Maggie O'Farrell