Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

That's because they're of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that's gone.

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. 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.

He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free.

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him

We must pursue what's in front of us, not what we can't have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.

I have this compulsion for freedom,for a state of liberation. It is an urge so strong, so all-encompassing that it overwhelms everything else. I cannot stand my life as it is. I cannot stand to be here, in this town, in this school. I have to get away.I have to work and work so that I can leave and only then can I create a life that will be liveable for me.

She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course." He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. "She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be." He glances at Eliza. "Those are rare qualities, are they not?

In any fairy-tale, getting what you wish for comes at a cost. There is always a codicil, an addendum to the granting of a wish. There is always a price to pay.

The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.

She is here now, outside the walls of the villa, where the night has painted its own version of the valley, in bold indigo strokes; where the wind animates this mysterious shaded landscape, setting the trees in motion, flinging night birds up to the blue-black air, driving angry blots across the unreadable face of the firmament.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

If she was liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her; if she was a pill, she would down her'; if she was a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean.

But there is nothing. A high whine of nothing, like the absence of noise when a church bell falls silent.

She has always cried such enormous tears, like heavy pearls, quite at odds with the slightness of her frame.

I have never found it difficult to abandon a group , to go against the alpha male or female. I have never much cared for gangs, for social tribes , for fitting in. I have known since I was very young that the in-crowd isin't my crowd;they are not my people.

The people who applaud the loudest, Lucrezia notes, are the ones who talked through the performance.

It was always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooing, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.

Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace.

She glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

You need a plan," she hears—or seems to hear—her old nurse, Sofia, say, from a place near her elbow. "To lose your temper is to lose the battle.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child's suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child's stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.

To lose your temper is to lose the battle.

She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.