Top 200 Maggie O'Farrell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

165. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

167. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Maggie O'Farrell

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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