Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

I am also shouting at the top of my voice. There's something about living in the middle of nowhere that invites this indulgence.

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories. I'd been a parent for about ten minutes when I met the man, but he taught me, with a small gesture, one of the most important things about the job: kindness, intuition, touch, and that sometimes you don't even need words.

am dead: Thou livest; …draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story —Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

I am dead: Thou livest; …draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story —Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

Can you not just put the seat belt on?" I snap. I can't help it. I have a low threshold for repetitive electronic noises.

It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. Which

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We bein in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON

And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.

I am the only tea abstainer in my family. I think they regard this as a baffling perversion. To me, tea tastes like dried lawn clippings, diluted leaf mold, watered down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. I have never been able to stomach it.

I think about the person I was in my mid 20's. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.

I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON

My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense— although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past—but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She doesn't think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.

The world was suddenly still; nothing was being required of me; I could stand in the quiet of my own skin.

There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.

The Irish are good in a crisis, Michael Francis thinks, as he eases back the clingfilm on a tray of sandwiches his aunt Bridie has left in the kitchen. They know what to do, what traditions must be observed; they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news: in murmurs, with shakes of the head, their accents wrapping themselves around the syllables of misfortune. A

When she first came to New York she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips when they enter a room.