148 Quotes by 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.

I am interested in silences.

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.

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.

Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.

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.

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’.

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.

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?