Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

153. “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

154. “The sounds of the street outside, the noises of the house, the footsteps of the servants coming up and down the corridor, the hushed tones of her daughters all reach her. It is as if she is underwater and they are all up there, in the air, looking down on her.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

156. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

172. “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

173. “How can they not have invited him to this meeting? He used to have influence – he used to rule over them all. He used to be someone.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

175. “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

176. “My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense – although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past – but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She doesn’t think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

177. “The problem is,” her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, “that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

178. “They call to one another in their particular argot: pure Home Counties cut with Teen American. A lot of yips, heys, elongated vowels. They swing bags through the air. Hair is flicked, stroked, tossed. Trousers are worn tight but low; shoes unlaced. The females link arms with their chosen peers; the males perform mock violence upon those they recognize as their tribe.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

180. “He’s instructed the boys to conjugate the verb ‘incarcerate’: the repeated hard c sound seems to scrape at the walls of the room, as if the very words themselves are seeking escape.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

181. “She is here now, outside the walls of the villa, where the night has painted its own version of the valley, in bold indigo strokes; where the wind animates this mysterious shaded landscape, setting the trees in motion, flinging night birds up to the blue-black air, driving angry blots across the unreadable face of the firmament.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

182. “She never liked school. The work she enjoyed, the lessons and the teachers. If only school could be just that. But the shoals of girls, forever combing and recombing their hair and snickering behind their hands. Insufferable, they were.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

183. “He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

184. “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

185. “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

186. “He is thinking of the girl, her braid, her hawk...”

— Maggie O'Farrell

187. “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

188. “Eliza doesn’t say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be. That for a long time she lay awake at night, whispering her name, just in case she was listening, from wherever she was, in case the sound of Eliza’s voice was a comfort to her. The pain of wondering if Anne was distressed somewhere and that she, Eliza, was unable to hear her, unable to reach her.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

189. “Esme looks up, sees the watch in Iris’s outstretched hand and shakes her head. She holds up the blue check material and Iris sees that it is a dress, a woollen dress, that it’s crumpled and two of the buttons are missing, torn out from the fabric. Esme is shaking it, as if something might be caught in its folds, then casts it aside.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

194. “Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can’t avoid? The thought falls into her head from nowhere, like a drop of wine into water, colouring her mind with its dark, spreading stain.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

195. “They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

196. “My wife who, just a moment ago, was a dark, forbidding figure with a gun, a long gray coat, and a hat like Death’s hood, she has shucked off the sou’wester and transmogrified back to her usual incarnation.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

197. “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

198. “He takes them in his hands; he meets their steady gazes; he looks into their identical eyes; he arranges them, head to foot, upon his knee; he watches as one takes the thumb of the other into its mouth and sucks upon it; he sees that the pair have led a life together that began before anything else. He touches their heads with both of his palms. You, he says, and you.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

199. “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.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

200. “The knowledge of it burns the inside of her head, leaving black scorch marks.”

— Maggie O'Farrell