79 Quotes by Maggie O'Farrell

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.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bears great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

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.

A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

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.

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.

She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.

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?