Top 120 Mhairi McFarlane Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

56. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

58. “Sometimes the truth is messy and difficult but it isn’t always best left. Sometimes it saves you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

59. “There’s something exceptional about friendships with friends you’ve known since you were young. They know all the versions of you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

60. “Delia realised you should see plenty of people you love, because the meaningful conversations don’t happen in the first twenty four hours together, or forty-eight, or even the first few days. They came at moments like this.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

66. “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

67. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

72. “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

73. “Words saved me. My words.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

74. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

81. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

88. “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

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

90. “Why did a woman’s voice have to be a chorus, to count?”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

92. “Sorry,’ he mutters back, in that reflexive British way where you’re apologetic that someone else has had to make an apology.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

93. “Single Anna was whole Anna. Not finding someone wasn’t a failure, it was just a fact.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

94. “Something I’ve learned is people do much worse things to you in the name of love, than they ever do as your enemy.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

96. “I thought the speech about how I was dementedly in love with you was enough encouragement, if that’s what you needed.’ ‘In love with me twelve years ago.’ ‘Why would that have changed? Nothing’s changed. Actually, that’s not true. I feel even more for you now than I did then.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

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

— Mhairi McFarlane

99. “I ponder how many mistakes in life are born of a simple fear of being rude.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

100. “When I say he’s not rude, what I really mean is he’s male and moneyed and got to that age where we allow him his chosen degree of rude as some sort of social entitlement, along with his bus pass.”

— Mhairi McFarlane