Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

ear, 'did you know that two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people?

Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone.

The witching hour," Daniel always called this time of day. He used to go out in it, every evening, and have a last cigarette as he walked the perimeter of the garden. He liked the moment, he said, when it was neither day nor night, but indefinably both.

guards run after the cart, their hats in their

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. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

and I took hers, it was as simple as that, but Father said I must never say, that—

Estos baños son un gran placer para mí. Karen Blixen dijo en sus Seven Gothic Tales: «Conozco un remedio para todos los males: agua salada […] en cualquiera de sus formas. Sudor, lágrimas o agua de mar».

Mother said that no parent in their right mind would display a portrait like that. Esme was not at all contrite. The chair was so uncomfortable, she said, there were two springs digging into my leg. She was funny like that, always so ridiculously oversensitive. She was like that princess in the story about the pea and all the mattresses. Is there a pea, I would say to her when she thrashed about in the bed at night, trying to get comfortable, and she would say, whole pods of them

She never liked school. The work she enjoyed, the lessons and the teachers. If only school could be just that. But the shoals of girls, forever combing and recombing their hair and snickering behind their hands. Insufferable, they were.

She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers—that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn't occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

That had done it. Esme had turned at that one. She had snatched up the protractor of Catriona McFarlane, high priestess of the tittering club, and pointed it at her like a divining rod. 'You know what you are, Catriona McFarlane?' Esme had said. 'You are a sad creature. You are mean-spirited, soulless. You are going to die alone and lonely. Do you hear me?

Odd that your life can contain such significant trip wires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

Esme straightens up, weighing the pebble in her palm. 'No,' she says. 'Were they burnt or strangled? Witches were strangled to death in parts of Scotland, weren't they? Or buried alive.

It may be tonight, in the deepest dark, because that is the most dangerous time for the sick.

Far above in the building, a door slams, muffled voices are heard and there is the sound of feet rapidly descending a staircase. The café seems to listen attentively. The dried glasses on the shelves vibrate against each other, in sympathy with the crashing footsteps. The contracting metal of the cappuccino machine clicks. A drop of water falls from the tap, spreads over the bowl of the sink, then trickles towards the plughole.

When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

and when I first saw him I thought I might dissolve, like sugar in water.

We will hit the ocean or the ground at speed and we will explode like cans of soda.

mine was white organdie with an orange-blossom trim and I didn't want the holly to tear it so she carried the wreath. She cared little for her dress. Scarlet velvet, she'd wanted. Crimson. But she got burgundy taffeta. And she said it didn't fit properly, the seams weren't straight and even I could see that but such things mattered so much to her that

a girl comes to crouch in front of me and I see that she is unlacing my shoes and taking them off and I say to her, I took it, I took it, and I've never told anyone. The girl looks up at me and she titters. You tell us every day, she says. I know she is lying so I say, it was my sister's, you know. And she just turns to speak to someone over her shoulder and—

And she looked up at me and it was as if she was waking from sleep. She stretched. She actually stretched and she said, hello, Kit. And then she must have seen that I was on the verge of tears because her face fell and she said, what is it? And I said, you. You are ruining my chances. And, you know, she said, chances of what? And I realised that if I were to successfully—

Please.' Esme stood. She clasped her hands together to keep them still. 'Miss Murray says I could get a scholarship and after that perhaps university and—' 'There would be no profit in it,' her father said, as he settled himself back into his armchair. My daughters will not work for a living.

The whole thing made Esme want to burst into honesty, to say, let's forget this charade, do you want to marry her or not?

Vas sortir corrent a fora, plena d'eufòria. Et senties com una ampolla d'aigua amb gas sacsejada. Volies xisclar, volies bramar.