Top 120 Mhairi McFarlane Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I felt safe with you, and in the end that wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

52. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

54. “Love at first sight and all that stuff is crap. It’s just the thrill of your imagination working on insufficient information.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

56. “Nothing worthwhile was without risk. You had to decide whether your feelings were strong enough to make it a risk worth taking.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Don’t expect someone who doesn’t know who they are to care who you are.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

60. “And I was scared my expectations were never going to be met. But I’ve learned it’s better to have unrealistic expectations than none at all.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

63. “The panic that her voice, the way she spoke, her attitude, all that was unique and specific to her, would pass into history. I wanted her to be here, and for her contributions and opinions to still be with us. That she is past tense, feels so impossible, when she was so vividly alive.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Men like fun much more than they like clever.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

68. “That’s the whole story of how I was so stupid as to risk everything that mattered to me, on something so meaningless.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

69. “I’d gone from not noticing Lucas ever to being consumed by noticing him constantly. I developed the sensory awareness of an apex predator: at any time I could tell you where Lucas was in the common room, without you ever seeing my eyes flicker toward him.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

70. “One night with you and he’s turned into a love-letter writer. You must have an incredible pelvic floor.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

71. “There’s shock and then there’s grief, and there’s the simple tiring unending chore of life afterward. These are all different things, I’ve learned.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

72. “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

73. “I don’t expect to be happy ever after. Just happier.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

74. “She loved him. They’d long ago passed the point where her love was negotiable; it wasn’t contingent on him not being an arsehole. He was her arsehole.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

75. “I wondered, Georgina, if you could imagine being in love with me again, the way I’m in love with you. And that given you’re the best thing to ever happen to me, if you could give me the chance to try to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

77. “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

78. “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

79. “Laurie,” he said quietly. Not a question, or an opening to saying anything else. A full sentence in itself.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

80. “You didn’t want me enough, when choosing me became harder.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

83. “You know, now our generation doesn’t have to get married – and thank goodness for that – it’s easy to think it’s a superfluous nonsense, and sometimes weddings are. But it’s also easy to forget how absolutely fantastic they can be.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

84. “Words saved me. My words.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

85. “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

86. “If you’re a mistake you’re the greatest one ever made. I’m really proud to know you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

87. “It was everything I could ever want, to be honest. You are everything I could ever want.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

88. “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

89. “I’m sick of being the person who tries to fit in and tells people what they want to hear and acts like nothing bothers her, it’s not got me anywhere.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

90. “I wonder what she wants?′ Sam said. ‘Apart from Cal’s balls and soul trapped in a haunted jam jar.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

91. “Some friendships got longer without getting deeper.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

92. “Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realise you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

94. “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

95. “Being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you, None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being your own again!”

— Mhairi McFarlane

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

99. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane