Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has to outpace it.

She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the 'wrong' side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.

I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. 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.

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

Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought

I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this....her leaving walk.

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories.

This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn't recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.

She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

He says again that he will not hurt her, she must not be scared, he will not hurt her, he will not, he promises, the words whispered in his new rasping voice. And then he hurts her anyway. The pain is startling, and curious in its specificity

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child's pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.