Maggie O'Farrell Quotes

I have this compulsion for freedom,for a state of liberation. It is an urge so strong, so all-encompassing that it overwhelms everything else. I cannot stand my life as it is. I cannot stand to be here, in this town, in this school. I have to get away.I have to work and work so that I can leave and only then can I create a life that will be liveable for me.

To me, tea taste like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid.

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.

When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand. I didn't know, as I lay there, that I would think of him many times in the years ahead. When my son lay on a hospital bed, age four, with the raging fever of meningitis, I reached through the bodies of the attending doctors and held his slack, heated hand in both of mine. When my youngest child disappeared beneath the waves of the Mediterranean Sea and I had to leap in, haul her out, turn her upside-down so that the water drained from her lungs. Then all she and I could do was sit on the sand, wrapped in towels, contemplating what had almost happened, her small fingers wrapped in mine.

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.

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.

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

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.

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

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?

Did my daughter appear to me a decade and a half before she was born? I like to think so. There she was, looping back through time to brush past a person not yet ready to be her mother--nowhere near ready, if I'm honest--tipping me the wink that she would one day arrive in my life. Readying me, perhaps, for the road ahead, sowing the seeds for all the strength, compassion and resilience required for her existence.

She hadn't ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.

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.

Claudette looks down at the thing in her hand. She turns it one way and the other. It is a packet of Italian coffee, half used, left behind. Innocuous enough in itself but in Claudette's hands, this particular morning, it is as dangerous as cyanide.

She isn't going to sniff it, no, she isn't. She wouldn't be stupid enough to attempt such a thing. Just a whiff of those smoky, dark, aromatic granules – heated up they always were, at length, lovingly, every morning in this kitchen, for all the years he lived here, the way he would stand waiting for them to brew, looking out of that window, that robe of his loose over his pyjamas, a child, usually, on his shoulder or his arm – would be enough to tip her over the edge. She isn't going to do it.

Certainly not.

Then she does, of course. She removes the clip, she places it on the counter, she parts the top of the silver-and-red packet and she brings it to her face and she inhales, she inhales, she inhales.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I have never found it difficult to abandon a group , to go against the alpha male or female. I have never much cared for gangs, for social tribes , for fitting in. I have known since I was very young that the in-crowd isin't my crowd;they are not my people.

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

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.

THAT THE THINGS IN LIFE WHICH DON'T GO TO PLAN ARE USUALLY MORE IMPORTANT, MORE FORMATIVE, IN THE LONG RUN, THAN THE THINSGS THAT DO

... 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.

What I wish I had known, aged twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you're a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.

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.