Maggie O'Farrell Quotes - Scribble Whatever

Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You’d Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. (Maggie O’Farrell Quotes)

“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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. 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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“Anyone, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. 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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
This Must Be the Place

“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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“Far above in the building, a door slams, muffled voices are heard and there is the sound of feet rapidly descending a staircase. The café seems to listen attentively. The dried glasses on the shelves vibrate against each other, in sympathy with the crashing footsteps. The contracting metal of the cappuccino machine clicks. A drop of water falls from the tap, spreads over the bowl of the sink, then trickles towards the plughole.”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Hand That First Held Mine

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“Gardens don’t stand still: they are always in flux.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“He has, Anges 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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
The Hand That First Held Mine

“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
This Must Be the Place

“He’s instructed the boys to conjugate the verb ‘incarcerate’: the repeated hard c sound seems to scrape at the walls of the room, as if the very words themselves are seeking escape.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“How could Fate be so cruel in setting her such a trap? To make her concentrate on the wrong child so that it could reach out, while she was distracted, and snatch the other?”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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?”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, where I can find it.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“I am the only tea abstainer in my family. I think they regard this as a baffling perversion. To me, tea tastes like dried lawn clippings, diluted leaf mold, watered down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. I have never been able to stomach it.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
After You’d Gone

“I have a theory,’ she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, ‘that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.” (Maggie O’Farrell Quotes)
Maggie O’Farrell
This Must Be the Place

“I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
This Must Be the Place

“In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“In any fairy-tale, getting what you wish for comes at a cost. There is always a codicil, an addendum to the granting of a wish. There is always a price to pay.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“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
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“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
The Hand That First Held Mine

“Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.”
Maggie O’Farrell
After You’d Gone

“Mary is of the opinion that grief is all very well in moderation, but there comes a time when it is necessary to make an effort. She is of the opinion that some people make too much of things. That life goes on.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“Odd that your life can contain such significant tripwires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that ‘Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
Instructions for a Heatwave

“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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“She has always cried such enormous tears, like heavy pearls, quite at odds with the slightness of her frame.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
After You’d Gone

“She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself.” (Maggie O’Farrell Quotes)
Maggie O’Farrell
This Must Be the Place

“She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“So it follows, of course, that she will be here now, in whatever form she can manage. Agnes does not need to turn her head, does not want to frighten her away. It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
Instructions for a Heatwave

“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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
Instructions for a Heatwave

“There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.”
Maggie O’Farrell
This Must Be the Place

“There is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“There is so much to do in a family of this size, so much to see to, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it, 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?”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“There is so much to do in an family this size, so much to see, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it, Agnes 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? Agnes doesn’t know.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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
Instructions for a Heatwave

“This person is now lost to her forever. 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 anymore.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“To me, tea taste like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Two women in a room. One seated, one standing”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“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
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.” (Maggie O’Farrell Quotes)
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
Maggie O’Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.”
Maggie O’Farrell
This Must Be the Place

“We will hit the ocean or the ground at speed and we will explode like cans of soda.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“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
After You’d Gone

“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.”
Maggie O’Farrell
After You’d Gone

“What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what’s going on, everything changes.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“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 time, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“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. Never think you are safe.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet

“What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”
Maggie O’Farrell
This Must Be the Place

“When she first came to New York she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips when they enter a room.”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“When you’re a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.”
Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am

“Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“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?”
Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave

“Why isn’t life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”
Maggie O’Farrell
After You’d Gone

“You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes”
Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet