79 Quotes by Maggie O'Farrell

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.

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.

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.

The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

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.

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.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

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.

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.