79 Quotes by Maggie O'Farrell

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

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

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories.

This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

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.

I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, where i can find it.

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.

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.

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