Faith Hogan > Quotes

“Marriages, like dreams, didn't just happen; you had to do some work to get there”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“allowed life to slip through her fingers, just a little with each passing year, until the gossamers of time had pulled so finally away that it was almost too late to make anything of what was left.”
― Faith Hogan, The Girl I Used to Know

“When she swam out far enough to feel as if she was being swallowed up in the vastness of the waves above her head, she felt as if suddenly she was at one with something far greater than she’d ever felt before. Crazy as it sounded, it was as if the sky, the ocean and the unfathomable depths below her all blended into one and she was as intricately linked to this vastness as she was to the tips of her toes or the tiniest molecule of DNA in her body.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“the delicious feel of the ocean cloaking her whole body and soul. Lying on her back, with the icy waters about her, looking up at the stars dotting the black sky was her release. For the ten minutes of capering about in the stinging cold, she felt altogether and utterly more alive than she’d ever imagined possible.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“Time and uncomplicated circumstances wait for no woman. Life is for grabbing it as it comes long, believe me, I know that much for sure”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“If it’s for you, it won’t pass you.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“happy ever after may be very different to how you could possibly have imagined, but that didn’t make it any less happy.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“Perhaps it was the sense of how completely irrelevant all her fears were in the face of the utter vastness of the sea and sky around her. She loved the silence and the roar of the ocean, the velvet sky and the inky water. Mostly she loved the fact that it made her feel alive in a way that nothing else could.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“Death, or unexpected death, was cruel like that, yanking away the person you loved so brutally that it seemed as if they were forever stranded between two worlds. She could never quite let him go and yet, she knew he wasn't really here any more”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“It anchors me in a place that’s mine within the vastness.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“maybe she had finally tipped over into a state of happy lunacy, but she didn’t care. For the first time in far too long, she felt what it was to be truly blissful.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“It’s never too late to be the man you can be, nor is it ever too soon.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“romance moved fast, and though Evie found it hard to imagine now, once she’d been a passionate lover. Once, she’d been on fire. Evie could put her finger precisely on the moment when things changed. It was an unusually warm evening; the sun was just settling, a deep crimson in the sky and she had been feeling a little low. Dr Stackhouse put it down to the menopause. She did not want to tell him that was already well behind her. So she smiled at him, in spite of the mild embarrassment, and headed for Carlinville, a six months’ supply of St John’s Wort and Evening Primrose Oil in her bag. Her mood had not lifted in months. Maybe she already knew something had changed between them. Paul came home that day, dangled a shiny set of keys before her. ‘It’s a classic,’ he told her. He forced a smile, but there was, she knew, nothing behind it. ‘I’ve bought it for us. I thought maybe I could take you out for spins, and if the weather is fine, we could bring a picnic.’ ‘Or perhaps I could drive…’ she said hopefully. ‘Dear, Evie, we both know where that almost ended up.’ Her father had made sure it was one of the few things he told Paul. He enjoyed recounting her near brush with the law and her habit of resting a little too heavily, in his opinion, on the accelerator. ‘We don’t want you thinking you’re in Monaco, do we?’ Paul smiled. He had no idea how much his words hurt. He had no more aspirations for her than her father had. Maybe he wanted to take care of her, but all too soon, he was taking care of someone else. In his expression, her whole world seemed to topple over. She knew that he was trapped. Trapped by his love for”
― Faith Hogan, My Husband's Wives

“peered”
― Faith Hogan, My Husband's Wives

“We want to do the right thing for everyone else and it’s only really when you get to my age that you begin to see that doing the right thing means starting with yourself, with the sort of life you want to live.”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“he was far too tied up with the importance of being right to understand the meaning of”
― Faith Hogan, The Girl I Used to Know

“We either confront it or we forgive, but we learn to live with things, not run away from them or hide behind something that’s shiny enough to cover over the pain momentarily.”
― Faith Hogan, The Bookshop Ladies

“It wasn't that she was shallow, exactly, but everyone knows, looks are important for media work...”
― Faith Hogan, My Husband's Wives

“Esme was old enough and wise enough to know that while having children changed a woman, not having them had changed her too.”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“Perhaps the gurus would call it purpose, but at their age, she had a feeling that purpose was a bit boring and she preferred the idea of being propelled out of bed by something that made her heart sing.”
― Faith Hogan, The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

“She’d allowed life to slip through her fingers, just a little with each passing year, until the gossamers”
― Faith Hogan, The Girl I Used to Know

“It was after five by the time Cora arrived back in Ballycove. She'd spent a bomb and it hadn't made her one bit happier. Who on earth said retail therapy actually cured anything? She was just wrecked tired with a lot less cash in her bank account”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“think, it’s only as we get older that we see the value of having neighbours and people around us, people who care and matter to us.”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“Well, us – human beings, women! We want to do the right thing for everyone else and it’s only really when you get to my age that you begin to see that doing the right thing means starting with yourself, with the sort of life you want to live.”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“if she”
― Faith Hogan, The Gin Sisters' Promise

“The familiar din of emptiness drummed louder than any other noise on earth”
― Faith Hogan, The Girl I Used to Know

“There is only the road you choose to take.”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“So why did she feel this heavy weight of emptiness instead, as if her marriage was some black hole and she was in danger of falling in and suffocating while life went on without her?”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea

“After all, books should be about escaping the mundane and stepping into worlds you didn’t want to leave.”
― Faith Hogan, The Bookshop Ladies

“seemed like an old man and Maureen wanted adventure. All she could talk about was seeing the world and finding herself, well, I mean any fool knows that if you can’t find yourself exactly where you are, you’re not going to trip over yourself in a student hostel somewhere in the far reaches of the Australian outback, are you?”
― Faith Hogan, The Guest House by the Sea