Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

At the bottom of the steps, she turns to Iris, her face full of confusion. 'They said it would be there. They promised they would put it in there for me.

At the bottom of the steps, she turns to Iris, her face full of confusion. 'They said it would be there. They promised they would put it in there for me.' 'I'm sorry,' Iris says, because she doesn't know what else to say. 'I wanted it,' she says. 'I just wanted it. And they promised.

The garden, Kitty, the boat, the minister, their grandmother, that handkerchief.

Esme picks up woollen combinations and asks where they go in the baffling order of things. The shopgirl looks at their grandmother who shakes her head. 'They are from the colonies,' she says.

They call to one another in their particular argot: pure Home Counties cut with Teen American. A lot of yips, heys, elongated vowels. They swing bags through the air. Hair is flicked, stroked, tossed. Trousers are worn tight but low; shoes unlaced. The females link arms with their chosen peers; the males perform mock violence upon those they recognize as their tribe.

You said.' Esme shuts her eyes, screws them up tight, bowing her head. 'You promised,' she says, almost inaudibly and, with her hands, she is crushing the material of her dress.

My wife who, just a moment ago, was a dark, forbidding figure with a gun, a long gray coat, and a hat like Death's hood, she has shucked off the sou'wester and transmogrified back to her usual incarnation.

how different it all might have been, how minuscule the causes and how devastating their effects.

Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can't avoid?

when he came off the beach. She would not see him again. She fought like a crazed thing. She fought to live, she fought to come back. She has always wanted to tell him this, in some way. She tried. She would like to say to him, Theo, I tried. I fought because I didn't see how I could leave you. But I lost.

said. 'Get my camera, would you?

and so I took hers. I did. And no one ever worked it out, so I suppose

What she has always dreaded is here. It has come.

Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

The tigress didn't so much pace as pour herself, as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano.

Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more.

and she picked up the glass from the table and she threw it to the floor, smash. I sat tight on the chair. She stamped her foot, like Rumpelstiltskin, and shouted, I will not go, I will not, you can't make me, I hate him, I despise him.

Peter had been feeling lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story

a large and ever-expanding range at the bullies' disposal.

Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we're not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn't know this?

I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it.

Agnes would like to tear it all down, rip it up, hurl it to the wind.

before she passes into that other realm, before she breathes her last.

Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied, good, and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.