Anne Enright Quotes & Sayings

There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts
they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared. — Anne Enright

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite. — Anne Enright

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me. — Anne Enright

He dribbled noise. — Anne Enright

Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke. — Anne Enright

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced. — Anne Enright

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books. — Anne Enright

I see her on a Sunday after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water. — Anne Enright

I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped. — Anne Enright

Try to be accurate about stuff. — Anne Enright

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.
'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here? — Anne Enright

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain? — Anne Enright

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer. — Anne Enright

Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A Nuisance.
Rosalene was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was incrasingly difficult. She made her children cry. — Anne Enright

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing. — Anne Enright

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural. — Anne Enright

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. — Anne Enright

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it. — Anne Enright

He slept like a shout. — Anne Enright

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear. — Anne Enright

Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. — Anne Enright

All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it's like being looked at by an alien, or a cat - who knows what they see? — Anne Enright

And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do. — Anne Enright

There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible. — Anne Enright

It is not that the Hegartys don't know what they want, it is that they don't know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray. — Anne Enright

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from. — Anne Enright

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there. — Anne Enright

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from. — Anne Enright

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking — Anne Enright

There often is a dark secret in books ... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge. — Anne Enright

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble. — Anne Enright

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page. — Anne Enright

I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept. — Anne Enright

Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands. — Anne Enright

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way. — Anne Enright

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice. — Anne Enright

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time. — Anne Enright

I didn't say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind - or did her mind go first, it's sort of hard to disentangle - and then for her to turn around and say Broken is Best, I didn't say how that made me furious beyond measure. — Anne Enright

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free. — Anne Enright

Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken's feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped in the wind and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat's teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that - at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock's outraged eye - but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood. — Anne Enright

He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever. — Anne Enright

There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing,
or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimes
it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was ... — Anne Enright

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life. — Anne Enright

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down. — Anne Enright

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital. — Anne Enright

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you. — Anne Enright

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all
from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'. — Anne Enright

We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light. — Anne Enright

I am interested in silences — Anne Enright

Only bad writers think that their work is really good. — Anne Enright

The kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next. — Anne Enright

I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now. — Anne Enright

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be. — Anne Enright

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way. — Anne Enright

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find. — Anne Enright

Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad. — Anne Enright

I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two. — Anne Enright

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity. — Anne Enright

She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday's weather. — Anne Enright

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time. — Anne Enright

I write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day. — Anne Enright

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety. — Anne Enright

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead — Anne Enright

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife. — Anne Enright

If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day. — Anne Enright

Has the rain a father ...
What womb brings forth the ice?
- Job: 38 — Anne Enright

There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity. — Anne Enright

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense. — Anne Enright

People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend. — Anne Enright

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require. — Anne Enright

There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten. — Anne Enright

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat. — Anne Enright

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line. — Anne Enright

I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met. — Anne Enright

Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes one bewildered - which is the proper way to be. — Anne Enright

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. And the girls will be picked up from school, and dropped off again in the morning. Your eldest daughter can remember her inhaler, and your youngest will take her gym kit with her, and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you. — Anne Enright

Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see. — Anne Enright

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't. — Anne Enright

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick. — Anne Enright

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too. — Anne Enright

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong. — Anne Enright

There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives. — Anne Enright

I have no place left to live but in my own heart. — Anne Enright

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened. — Anne Enright

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since. — Anne Enright

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately. — Anne Enright

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this. — Anne Enright

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised — Anne Enright

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team. — Anne Enright

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely. — Anne Enright

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs. — Anne Enright

Do not sigh, do not weep! — Anne Enright

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible. — Anne Enright

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar. — Anne Enright

Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find
blood, nails, a bit of anguish. — Anne Enright

There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight-which was thought a little enthusiastic - and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit. — Anne Enright

Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault. — Anne Enright

Paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled. — Anne Enright

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch. — Anne Enright

I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most - a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park. — Anne Enright