Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

155. “Joan is altijd ontevreden en ze rust niet voordat een ander dat ook is. Het enige waar zij blij van wordt is andere mensen net zo ongelukkig maken als zij. Ze wil graag gezelschap in die ongelukkige ontevredenheid van haar.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

176. “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

177. “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

178. “She then leans over and thrusts the edge of the letter into the sconce burning on the wall of the stairwell. For a second or two, it seems the flame cannot believe its luck, refusing to consume the page. Then it comes to its senses, asserting its grasp, turning the edges of the paper black, shrivelling and devouring them.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

179. “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

180. “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

181. “Esme straightens up, weighing the pebble in her palm. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Were they burnt or strangled? Witches were strangled to death in parts of Scotland, weren’t they? Or buried alive.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

183. “He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

184. “Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn’t change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied “Good” and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

185. “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

186. “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

187. “The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

188. “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

189. “She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

190. “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

191. “Mother said that no parent in their right mind would display a portrait like that. Esme was not at all contrite. The chair was so uncomfortable, she said, there were two springs digging into my leg. She was funny like that, always so ridiculously oversensitive. She was like that princess in the story about the pea and all the mattresses. Is there a pea, I would say to her when she thrashed about in the bed at night, trying to get comfortable, and she would say, whole pods of them.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

192. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

194. “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

195. “Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

196. “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

197. “To walk by his grave every Sunday is both a pain and a pleasure. She wants to lie there so that her body covers it. She wants to dig down with her bare hands. She wants to strike it with a tree branch. She wants to build a structure over it, to shield it from the wind and the rain. Perhaps she would come to live in it, there, with him.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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