Quotes from Anne Enright

It is not that the Hegartys don't know what they want, it is that they don't know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.

Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.

This is what remains. Magical objects with the magic gone out of them. A few cassettes and no tape machine on which they can be played.

Boyd loved an inaccuracy, for example, because an inaccuracy could render everything else you said void. It

There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight-which was thought a little enthusiastic - and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.

They sat in the upstairs living room, a place furnished, one way or another, from the stages of Dublin, so you were always sitting in character, you were just not sure which one.

If I am a fool, he said, Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.

They took their cue from Niall Duggan, a courtly type who spoke in puns, inversions, mock-ee-yah Irish and Sic transit, sonorous, brief bursts of Latin, which always triggered heavy assent, Carpe, yes, carpe indeed. It was a high style of bullshit, quite formal, with no jokes about sex, no disrespecting women. Or no mentioning women, now I come to think about it. Except face to face, when he was often obscene.

Professionally, sexually. In those days, when a woman hit thirty she went home and shut the door. So it is to her great credit that my mother refused to lie down and die.

There was an amount of politics involved in an evening like this. It was a kind of rule of thumb that the later the arrival, the more sympathetic to the Republican Cause, and these particular musicians came last of all.

There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity.

After three more years, she was released from the asylum, rattling with pills – a much reduced, soon to be terminally ill woman who was invisible, on the street, to those who passed her by.

Jej bÅ'Ä™kit zajÄ…Å' miejsce w szarych zakamarkach jego mózgu i pozostaÅ' tam do koÅ"ca ?ycia

Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.

They are surprisingly tall--eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers' children look like proper people by the aged of eight...

Who told me this (apart from everyone?)- that a man takes his pleasure and gives only pain. That sex is a kind of punishment, and this punishment is perfect because it fits the crime so well. Here. This is what you get for wanting. Imagine my surprise. ...it was like being a plane all your life and not knowing you could fly. Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.

paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

And, by the way, we all consider sleeping with the bad man – we want to fix his hurt, or we want him to hurt us – one way or another, we are all attracted to the shadow.

I don't blame him for anything now. Or not much. All of this will, in some form, happen to you. You will wake some morning and pat yourself down. You will realise that you think too much and live too little and that most people, men and women both, are mostly fine. You will love more easily and relinquish blame. At least I hope you will.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.

Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes one bewildered - which is the proper way to be.

Oh yes, thank you, Kitty,' she said and then sat and looked at her food. At one point she keeled forward and laid her cheek along her cigarette arm, which was stuck out straight across the tabletop. She was weeping. If such a thing can be said of someone who was making no sound and shedding no tears. Then she straightened up, pushed the palm of her hand up across her cheek and resumed her cigarette, ate through exhaled smoke, and poured herself some red wine.

Katherine read constantly. She loved biographies of male dictators and enjoyed a long Stalin phase when she became obsessed, not by the Gulags or by the Yalta Conference, but by his wife's suicide, his taste for sweet Georgian wines, the way he made his ministers bark 'The Blue Danube' after dinner, like dogs. She quoted his daughter Svetlana, who said, 'He was a Sagittarius, you know, on the cusp with Capricorn.

Prithee Sirrah and Begorrah.