Top 120 Mhairi McFarlane Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Life’s veered sharply away from the script. We’re traveling a branch of an alternative future we were never meant to be on.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

52. “Laurie briefly debated saying: You know that this is really rude, right? I mean, you know you can’t stick “no offense” on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterward.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

53. “I shouldn’t have needed to hear what you said last night. I wanted to be everything to you, and instead I was another one of the men who was angry at you for not being able to have you, the way I wanted.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

54. “You know that this is really rude, right? I mean, you know you can’t stick “no offense” on the end like it takes the curse off?”

— Mhairi McFarlane

55. “This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone. The click of a jigsaw’s last piece, the rainfall of coins in a jackpot slot machine, the right song striking up and your being swept away by its opening bars. That conviction of making complete sense of the universe, in one moment. Of course. You’re where I should be. You’re here.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

56. “Cuando se trata de ti, lo recuerdo todo.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

57. “The moment where you consider giving in, or do give in, that’s the moment you torture yourself about for the rest of your life. That’s the moment where you think it happened to you because you are a bad and weak person, who wanted it really. When in fact, it’s about survival. And whichever choice you make, it wasn’t really a choice at all.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

58. “I know this is weak, but, I’m thirty-four, and on the horizon I can see ‘not being blatantly hit on by twenty-something barmen any more’. Like the Next sale on Boxing Day, I am suddenly interested in grabbing something that doesn’t suit me and I will soon regret, just because I can.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

59. “I wondered if you wanted someone to help zip your dress up before a night out. I wondered if you wanted someone to call first in a crisis. I wondered if you wanted someone to text to bring you fish and chips when you can’t be arsed with a proper dinner. I wondered if you wanted someone in your corner when you visit your family, someone who will tell them how lucky they are to have you. I wondered if you wanted someone to fetch the Lucozade when you have the flu.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

60. “The way I see it,’ Edie said, holding both their hands, as they looked at the water rushing over the rocks, ’you get people who are important to you, for as long as you get them. You never know how long it will be. You have to accept it and make use of the time you have.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

61. “No, exactly. He’d be saying, ‘I’m so sorry I let you down at the end.’ But you don’t need his apology. And he wouldn’t need yours.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

62. “Beauty isn’t an arrangement of features, even features as perfect as Finlay Hart’s, it’s a feeling. This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

63. “I notice, once again, that company that’s not the right fit for you is so much lonelier than being happily alone.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

64. “I saw the love of my life about to walk out and I thought complete honesty would mean losing you forever. It’s taken me until now to see that complete honesty was my only hope.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

65. “Put it this way. I’m kind of a communist when it comes to relationships.” “You think we should all be state owned?” “I think whenever they fail, we focus on what specific people did wrong within the system, overlooking the fact that the whole institution’s rotten and dysfunctional.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

66. “You need people to like you. Stop caring so much. It doesn’t matter.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

67. “Don’t be so bloody British,’ he said. ‘This country. We’d rather quietly kill ourselves over something than be any bother.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

68. “Words saved me. My words.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

69. “I’m sure you can see why I think I’m worth more than someone who spent sixteen years making up his mind about whether I was worth the hassle.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

70. “The way he undermines you gradually: it’s so hard to explain until you’ve been through it. He waits until you’re in love and completely vulnerable and then it starts, and you have no defences.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

71. “London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

72. “I’m not carrying it anymore. I spoke the words aloud, used my words, and broke the curse.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

73. “She’d guessed it was partly borne of a private education. Now she pictured him on yachts, as well as attending Hogwarts.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

74. “No wonder we play ‘the what’s for you, won’t pass you’ mind games with ourselves, when the brutal senselessness is so hard to swallow.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

75. “As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are tolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

76. “Very few people voluntarily make things worse for themselves, if they have a choice. You know, there’s the way we all like to think we behave, and then there’s the way we actually do.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

77. “She wasn’t sure about being christened the office’s ‘resident sleuth,’ just because she’d discovered the persistent odour in the ladies lavatory had come from an ‘upper decker’ left in one of the cisterns by a discontented male work experience placement who might have deep-rooted issues with women.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

78. “I was a natural show-off who hates being the center of attention:.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

79. “I’d rather have things go wrong with you than right with anyone else.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

80. “One of the hardest things to explain to a child is why adulthood involved doing so many things you knew you definitely didn’t want to do.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

81. “Love is what we call it when we find someone else, but lose ourselves.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

82. “Imagine. Imagine being a man, and thinking your approval has such value, that this sort of oily off-the-cuff compliment can stitch a wound this big.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

83. “At least when I don’t like myself, I still know who I am. You have a face for every occasion. When you’re on your own, you must disappear. Who are you, when no one’s looking?”

— Mhairi McFarlane

84. “It was really interesting to me, unravelling why we behave the way we do.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

85. “It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

86. “When people did monumentally awful things to you, it seemed they didn’t even have the courtesy of being original, of inflicting some unique war wound, a lightning bolt-shaped scar.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

87. “I read an analogy of depression,’ Meg said, as they steadied, wiping under her eyes with a floppy cuff. ‘About how killing yourself is like jumping out of a tall building when it’s on fire. You don’t want to jump out, but bit by bit, it becomes impossible not to because you’re so scared and in so much pain. No one thinks anyone jumping out of a building on fire wants to do it.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

88. “Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

89. “She thought there was a lot of truth in the closest friendships being unconsummated romances.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

90. “You know how your family can wind you up in a way no one else can quite hear? Like a dog whistle?”

— Mhairi McFarlane

91. “Allergic to lettuce. Harriet sometimes thought that was Jon in three words. Who on earth is allergic to lettuce? Imagine the shame at the inquest. Cause of Death: radicchio.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

92. “You know the school science project where you dipped a penny in fizzy drink and it came out shining and new? That’s how you’ve made me feel. Thank you for being the off-brand cola to my coin.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

93. “It feels like a conversation you never want to end, I suppose. “A renewable energy source. You know how with some people you can’t get chatting off the ground? They’re hard work? Falling in love is the extreme opposite. Endless fascination. It’s effortless. A spark turns into a flame turns into a fire. That doesn’t go out.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

94. “It’s actually very hard to tell when you should split up with someone. All I knew was I was waking up every morning thinking this can’t be it, until death. When your relationship is making you feel life’s too long, something’s gone awry.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

95. “Claiming to care about someone or something, Laurie saw, could be highly manipulative. It was a way of ascribing yourself rights.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

96. “The air was thick with a Terrible Unsaid.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

97. “It’s like my whole life was about traveling back to you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

98. “It’s very powerful to know you can cope. You can do anything after that.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

99. “Acts of kindness, acts of thoughtfulness: they could echo down the years long after the person who had offered them was gone. This was worth knowing.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

100. “The things we do to avoid difficult things are often worse than the difficult thing.”

— Mhairi McFarlane