Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?

She hadn't ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed?

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, 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.

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones.

The problem is," her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, "that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.

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 has created this moment – no one else – and yet, now it is happening, she finds that it is entirely at odds with what she desires. What she desires is for him to stay at her side, for his hand to remain in hers. For him to be there, in the house, when she brings this baby into the world. For them to be together.

And now there is this—this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?

The theatres are closed, because of the plague, by order of the court, and so the lodger and his company of players have taken themselves off to tour nearby towns, places where it is permitted to gather in a crowd.

She moves her comb, her shift, her gown next door. She takes up the bed that was once her aunts'. Nothing is said. She leaves her mother and sister to their grief and moves in above the workshop.

Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace. 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.

thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until—what?

Descubre que es posible llorar todo el día y toda la noche. Que hay muchas formas de llorar: lágrimas que se derraman de repente, gemidos hondos y desgarrados, el interminable goteo silencioso de agua de los ojos.

Whoever it used to belong to wishes her

Morirse será así, notar que algo se acerca y que no se puede evitar?

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

When you engender a life, you open yourself to risk, to fear. Holding my child, I realised my vulnerability to death: I was frightened of it, for the first time. I knew all too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated.

What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what's going on, everything changes.

The smell of his grandparents' home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool.

Morirse será así, notar que algo se acerca y que no se puede evitar? Este pensamiento surge de la nada y le cae en la cabeza como una gota de vino en el agua, la mancha, oscura y expansiva, le colorea las ideas.

Pero ¿y si sus palabras no fueran suficiente? ¿Y si ella no es remedio suficiente para su dolor sin nombre?

Eliza doesn't say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be. That for a long time she lay awake at night, whispering her name, just in case she was listening, from wherever she was, in case the sound of Eliza's voice was a comfort to her. The pain of wondering if Anne was distressed somewhere and that she, Eliza, was unable to hear her, unable to reach her.