Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

She then leans over and thrusts the edge of the letter into the sconce burning on the wall of the stairwell. For a second or two, it seems the flame cannot believe its luck, refusing to consume the page. Then it comes to its senses, asserting its grasp, turning the edges of the paper black, shrivelling and devouring them.

I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages.

Do you still think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, 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.

She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.

Oh,' she burst out. 'I hate this—I hate it.' 'What?' 'Just—this. I feel as though I'm waiting for something and I'm getting scared it might never come.

Ahora esa persona se ha perdido para siempre. Va a la deriva, no reconoce su propia vida. Está desamarrada, extraviada. Es una persona que llora si no encuentra un zapato, si cuece la sopa más de lo debido o tropieza con un cacharro. Las cosas pequeñas la deshacen. Ya no hay certezas, nada es seguro.

She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches. She will keep her counsel. He is the one who has caused this problem, this breach in their marriage: He can be the one to address it.

He thinks of his grief over his sister as an entity that is horribly and painfully attached to him, the way a jellyfish might adhere to your skin or a goitre or an abscess. He pictures it as viscid, amorphous, spiked, hideous to behold. He finds it unbelievable that no one else can see it. Don't mind that, he would say, it's just my grief. Please ignore it and carry on with what you were saying.

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. 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. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.

How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.

And as these words come, one after another, it is possible for him to slip away from himself and find a peace so absorbing, so soothing, so private, so joyous that nothing else will do.

If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds. He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.

She cannot imagine how it might be, to see him again. He would be a child and she is now grown, almost a woman. What would he think? Would he recognise her now, if he were to pass her in the street, this boy who will for ever remain a boy? Several

and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

prepare her for the next world. They wept as they did so, not because

I mean', he says, 'that I don´t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.' 'Like me?' 'Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just loo at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say- and what you might not- before you say it. It is' he says, 'both a joy and a curse.

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else? I never knew it was possible to think about someone all of the time, for someone to be always doing acrobatic leaps across your thoughts. Everything else was an unwelcome distraction from what I wanted to think about.

He is, he prides himself, adept at dissembling, at reading the thoughts of others, at guessing which way they will jump, what they will do next.

Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it.

She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.

She feels it; he feels it. They know it and they know each other's thoughts and they sense each other's actions and fears. She does not know why this is or where it might lead, but she knows it must remain hidden, and silent as the tongue in his head.

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He

Qué curioso, piensa ella, tener a otro tan cerca: la escala desbordante de las pestañas, de los párpados cerrados, del pelo de la frente, todo mirando hacia el mismo sitio.