Maggie O'Farrell Quotes & Sayings

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing — Maggie O'Farrell

This is what Lilly loves about London, that every building, street, common and square, has had different uses, that everything was once spomething else, that the present, was once the past ammended — Maggie O'Farrell

Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied "Good" and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen. — Maggie O'Farrell

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this. — Maggie O'Farrell

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. — Maggie O'Farrell

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave. — Maggie O'Farrell

The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like. — Maggie O'Farrell

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people. — Maggie O'Farrell

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? — Maggie O'Farrell

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. — Maggie O'Farrell

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen? — Maggie O'Farrell

to having his own way, to people jumping when he called, jump. Lexie — Maggie O'Farrell

The previous day and the day yet to come hang in a balance, each waiting for the other to make a move. — Maggie O'Farrell

All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away. — Maggie O'Farrell

Today I am bothered by the story of King Canute. ( ... ) The story is, of course, that he was so arrogant and despotic a leader that he believed he could control everything - even the tide. We see him on the beach, surrounded by subjects, sceptre in hand, ordering back the heedless waves; a laughing stock, in short. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if, in fact, he was so good and great a king that his people began to elevate him to the status of a god, and began to believe that he was capable of anything? In order to prove to them that he was a mere mortal, he took them down to the beach and ordered back the waves, which of course kept on rolling up the beach. How awful it would be if we had got it so wrong, if we had misunderstood his actions for so long. — Maggie O'Farrell

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him — Maggie O'Farrell

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. — Maggie O'Farrell

They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general. — Maggie O'Farrell

She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this ... her leaving walk. — Maggie O'Farrell

She doesn't like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small. — Maggie O'Farrell

Strange weather brings out strange behavior. As a Bunsen burner applied to a crucible will bring about an exchange of electrons, the division of some compounds and the unification of others, so a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly. They act not so much out of character but deep within it. — Maggie O'Farrell

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen. — Maggie O'Farrell

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. — 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. — Maggie O'Farrell

I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may be your life but you're not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you
it's already organised.' It's all chance and choice, which is far more frightening. — Maggie O'Farrell

She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it's an impossibility, it's unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind. — Maggie O'Farrell

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out. — Maggie O'Farrell

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? — Maggie O'Farrell

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in. — Maggie O'Farrell

Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it. — Maggie O'Farrell

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents. — Maggie O'Farrell

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated. — Maggie O'Farrell

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? — Maggie O'Farrell

An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days. — Maggie O'Farrell

another growl at his back. Then she looked again at the typescript — Maggie O'Farrell

Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o'clock, and the dual personality of the city's main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens. — Maggie O'Farrell

There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn't, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in. — Maggie O'Farrell

... one of those terrifying rows where suddenly an end you never thought would come rears up in front of you, like a cliff edge you weren't aware of. — Maggie O'Farrell

He is momentarily filled with a kind of pity for his son. What a task lies ahead of him: to learn literally everything. — Maggie O'Farrell

She hadn't ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did — Maggie O'Farrell

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she'd grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world? — Maggie O'Farrell

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell. — Maggie O'Farrell