Quotes from Anne Enright

And this would be fine if he lived in any other town, but in Dublin every fool had a novel on the go, so he was, as Hughie Snell liked to endlessly repeat, 'a eunuch in the great harem of Irish literature'.

During the summers, she worked with the fit-ups.

She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday's weather.

People , she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed.

A Papa az ír nyugaton nÅ'tt fel - mindig is tudta, mi a helyes. Tökéletes modora volt. Ami szerintem nagyjából abból allt, hogy soha, senkinek semmit nem mondott.

He dribbled noise.

His hair needed a comb, and there was a gleam of something under his nose, but he was so very much himself.

I continue to be interested in the fact that children come out of your body, that giving birth is like pulling the sleeve of death inside out.

How important is it to be 'important' as a writer?

A britek, jövök rá, csak akkor temetnek el valakit, amikor már annyira halott, hogy más szót kell rá használni. A britek addig várnak a temetéssel, hogy a rokonok nem is gyászolni gy?lnek össze, hanem panaszkodni, hogy még mindig ott van a tetem.

the wall, over by the door, where Liam threw a knife

And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.

I have all my regrets between pouring the wine and reaching for the glass.

If Kafka had been a woman, then Gregor Samsa would not have turned into an insect, he would not have had to. Gregor would be Gretel and she would wake up one morning pregnant. She would try to roll over and discover she was stuck on her back. She would wave her little hands uselessly in the air.

I didn't say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind - or did her mind go first, it's sort of hard to disentangle - and then for her to turn around and say Broken is Best, I didn't say how that made me furious beyond measure.

It was a task more than a burden. Once you have actually carried a dead man you are happy enough to leave him down, let them put the box into the damn ground.

Do not sigh, do not weep!

Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A Nuisance. Rosalene was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was incrasingly difficult. She made her children cry.

There was something out of kilter with his mother's happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.

I get out of the car to look at it. 1922–1989

It was all very nice as a feeling, but love was no use, at the end of the day, to man or beast, when there was no fucking justice in the world.

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down. 'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?

And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.