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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine – perhaps to a fault – about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn’t scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed?”

— Maggie O'Farrell

172. “You said.’ Esme shuts her eyes, screws them up tight, bowing her head. ‘You promised,’ she says, almost inaudibly and, with her hands, she is crushing the material of her dress.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

189. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

191. “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

192. “The theatres are closed, because of the plague, by order of the court, and so the lodger and his company of players have taken themselves off to tour nearby towns, places where it is permitted to gather in a crowd.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

193. “She wouldn’t let go of the baby,’ her grandmother says suddenly. ‘Who?’ Iris pounces. ‘Esme?’ Her grandmother’s eyes are focused somewhere beyond the window. ‘They had to sedate her. She wouldn’t let go.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

197. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

199. “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

200. “Esme began playing the game she often played with herself at times like this, looking over the room and working out how she might get round it without touching the floor. She could climb from the sofa to the low table and, from there, to the fender stool. Along that and then –.”

— Maggie O'Farrell