Anne Enright > Quotes

“People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I have no place left to live but in my own heart.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I am interested in silences”
― Anne Enright

“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.”
― Anne Enright

“There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. And the girls will be picked up from school, and dropped off again in the morning. Your eldest daughter can remember her inhaler, and your youngest will take her gym kit with her, and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“And dusk fell because it suited his skin.”
― Anne Enright, What Are You Like?

“Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.”
― Anne Enright

“Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”
― Anne Enright

“the kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.”
― Anne Enright

“He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing,
or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimes
it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was...”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important... and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”
― Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

“I see her on a Sunday after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering