Quotes from Anne Enright

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?

I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.

I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept.

Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.

If you think about it, the youngest part of the tree is in the very middle. It is the little dot that will widen into a ring, next year. The youngest part of any tree is the heart.

All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it's like being looked at by an alien, or a cat - who knows what they see?

He slept like a shout.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

Just the way all mothers are crazy to their daughters, all mothers are wrong.

Has the rain a father... What womb brings forth the ice? - Job: 38

Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad.

But was talking aloud allowed?

We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.

A pair of swans above the lock, the waters pouring down into the pool below: the rightness of things restored me to my own proper desiring. I got up and walked back home very slowly, putting the right motives back in the right bodies. This is what Duggan did, this is what I did. This is what he wanted and knew, this is what I wanted. This is what I did not want. This is what I did not know. Also, the difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.

Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find-- blood, nails, a bit of anguish.

I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most - a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.