Anne Enright Quotes

The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.

I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

He slept like a shout.

I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.

Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find
blood, nails, a bit of anguish.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

The kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.

You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.

And dusk fell because it suited his skin.

He dribbled noise.

But was talking aloud allowed?

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.

Do not sigh, do not weep!

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking

We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

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.

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.

The only way to write a book, I'm fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That's how you write a book.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.

I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.

He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever.

Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

I am interested in silences

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

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.

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

I have no place left to live but in my own heart.

Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad.

God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke.

Has the rain a father ...
What womb brings forth the ice?
- Job: 38

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.