Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

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. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it.

Outside, the colours accost his eyes: the glancing lapis sky, the virulent green of the verge, the creamy blossoms of a tree, the pink kirtle of a woman leading a nag along the road.

He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.

Gardens don't stand still: they are always in flux.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's.

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I'm told it's perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.

Cuando mira a alguien le ve hasta el fondo del alma. No hay ni una gota de hostilidad en ella. Se toma a las personas por lo que son, no por lo que deberían ser. —Observa a Eliza—. Son cualidades poco comunes, ¿verdad?

Do you think, Daniel," she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, "that we might have reached the end of our story?

This is a different man, surely, from the one who ordered Contrari's death. It cannot have been him. This is her husband, who loves her, or seems to; that was the ruler of Ferrara. They are the same man, they are different men, the same yet different.

A cold fear rinses down through his chest, encasing his heart in an instant, crackling frost.

It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father's gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat.

Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?

Hamnet wills that it is Judith that is to live.

Is it possible for a woman to be so unsettled in spirit that a child will have no hope of taking root within her?

Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for

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.

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.

Joan is altijd ontevreden en ze rust niet voordat een ander dat ook is. Het enige waar zij blij van wordt is andere mensen net zo ongelukkig maken als zij. Ze wil graag gezelschap in die ongelukkige ontevredenheid van haar.

How can they not have invited him to this meeting? He used to have influence – he used to rule over them all. He used to be someone.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard.

Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

But his is a mind also easily distracted.