Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The

Qu'as-tu vu? lui demande-t-il. - Rien. Ton cÅ"ur. - Ce n'est rien? dit-il, faussement outré. Rien? Comment peux-tu dire une chose pareille?" Elle lui sourit, fait semblant de sourire, mais il lui prend alors la main et la pose sur sa poitrine. "Et ce n'est pas mon cÅ"ur que tu as vu, lui dit-il. Mais le tien.

In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.

He's instructed the boys to conjugate the verb 'incarcerate': the repeated hard c sound seems to scrape at the walls of the room, as if the very words themselves are seeking escape.

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.

There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way. "Go, then," she says, turning from him, pushing him away, "if you are going. Return when you can.

She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She can not leave him here.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine - perhaps to a fault - about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn't scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.

She wouldn't let them take Hugo. They had to prise him from her. It took her father and a man they'd got from somewhere. Her mother stood by the window until it was all over.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives . . . The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.

She wouldn't let go of the baby,' her grandmother says suddenly. 'Who?' Iris pounces. 'Esme?' Her grandmother's eyes are focused somewhere beyond the window. 'They had to sedate her. She wouldn't let go.

That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it.

She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf.

Aged sixteen, is what she sees first. Then: Insists on keeping her hair long. Iris reads the whole document from beginning to end, then goes back and reads it again. It ends with: Parents report finding her dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother's clothes.

To ignore it is to drain it of its power.

The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn't think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez. 'Ishbel,' she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, 'something will have to be done about the clothes.

Her dress was strange: she wouldn't have the organdie, she wanted red, she said, crimson was the word she used. Velvet. I will have a crimson velvet, she said to Mrs Mac as she stood at the fire. You will not, Mother said from the sofa, you are the granddaughter of an advocate, not a saloon girl, and she was paying, you see, so Esme had to settle for a kind of burgundy taffeta. Wine, Mrs Mac called it, which I think made her feel

The knowledge of it burns the inside of her head, leaving black scorch marks.

Esme looks up, sees the watch in Iris's outstretched hand and shakes her head. She holds up the blue check material and Iris sees that it is a dress, a woollen dress, that it's crumpled and two of the buttons are missing, torn out from the fabric. Esme is shaking it, as if something might be caught in its folds, then casts it aside.

Karen Blixen wrote, in her Seven Gothic Tales, 'I know a cure for everything: salt water . . . in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out.

That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.