Anne Enright Quotes

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.

My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.

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.

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.

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?

Paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

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.

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.

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.

They are surprisingly tall
eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers' children look like proper people by the aged of eight ...

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?

Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

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

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

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

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.

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

I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.

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

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.

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

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.

You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.

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.

He dribbled noise.

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

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.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad

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

But was talking aloud allowed?

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.

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.

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

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

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.

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.

And dusk fell because it suited his skin.

God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

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.

If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.

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

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

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

I am interested in silences

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.

Do not sigh, do not weep!

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.

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

The only way to write a book, I'm fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That's how you write a book.

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'.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.

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.

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

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.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

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.

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.