Top 100 Maeve Binchy Quotes
#1. I don't think you're happier if you're thin or beautiful or rich or married. You have to make your own happiness. My heroines do not become beautiful elegant swans, they become confident ducks and get on with life.
Maeve Binchy
#2. I was fat, and that was awful because when you're young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you're fat.
Maeve Binchy
#3. I didn't get excited by weight loss, and since I was already happy being fat, I couldn't see the point of it all. I'm 6 ft. and weigh about 18 st. or 19 st., but weighing myself is not something I do with much pleasure.
Maeve Binchy
#4. I realized that you didn't have to make self-deprecating remarks or turn yourself into the butt of some unspoken joke. I also discovered that being big didn't deter possible suitors.
Maeve Binchy
#5. he must not know how much power he had to move her.
Maeve Binchy
#6. I am not a member of Fat Liberation, nor do I think that obesity is healthy. But I do believe that in many ways my life has been a more charmed and happy one because I was always large.
Maeve Binchy
#7. We have to make our own happiness, and we have to make our own decisions and play the hand that is dealt to us.
Maeve Binchy
#8. Eve showed Aidan how to rake the range. "I think when we're married we might have something more modern," he grumbled. "No, surely with the eight children we can have them stoking it, going up the chimney even.
Maeve Binchy
#9. I don't think we should spend any time wandering around that remote possibility. It's nice of you to wish me well, but actually I find it unbearably patronizing.
Maeve Binchy
#10. I discovered that men were just like everyone else, really. They liked you if you were good-tempered and easy to talk to. And being a big girl meant other females trusted you more and confided in you.
Maeve Binchy
#11. But an intelligent man like you would know that to live in an unrealistic hope is a very foolish way to spend a life. - Lena Gray
Maeve Binchy
#12. My memory of my home was that it was very happy, and that there was more fun and life there than there was anywhere else.
Maeve Binchy
#13. If you're going on a plane journey, you're more likely to take one of my stories than 'Finnegan's Wake.'
Maeve Binchy
#14. I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out.
Maeve Binchy
#15. That Dr. Morrissey had always said that we found excuses to put off doing something that would take our minds off our worries. It was as if we didn't want to lose the luxury of worrying.
Maeve Binchy
#16. After my hip operation, I had to cut out butter, which I loved, and salt. I no longer eat desserts with lots of cream, and I've cut right back on alcohol.
Maeve Binchy
#17. The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you learn to write very quickly; there is no time to sit and brood about what you are going to say.
Maeve Binchy
#18. On the first day of school, my father told me I'd be the most popular girl and everyone would love me and want to be my friend. It wasn't so, but it gave me an enormous amount of confidence.
Maeve Binchy
#19. Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.
Maeve Binchy
#20. My father went to work by train every day. It was half an hour's journey each way, and he would read a paperback in four journeys. After supper, we all sat down to read - it was long before TV, remember!
Maeve Binchy
#21. I wore miniskirts in the days when no fat girls should have, and with total delight.
Maeve Binchy
#22. I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.
Maeve Binchy
#23. I'm getting better, happier, and nicer as I grow older, so I would be terrific in a couple of hundred years time.
Maeve Binchy
#24. I look placid, you see, that's why people think I'm fine. Inside I worry a lot.
Maeve Binchy
#25. You say to yourself: 'What could people, in all these countries, find in my books?' and yet I think we're all the same, anywhere. Everybody is a hero or a dramatic person in their own story if you just know where to look.
Maeve Binchy
#26. No point in destroying Wednesday thinking about Friday. This one-day-at-a-time thing really worked. Friday
Maeve Binchy
#27. I am a big, confident, happy woman who had a loving childhood, a pleasant career, and a wonderful marriage. I feel very lucky.
Maeve Binchy
#28. I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.
Maeve Binchy
#29. I live in Ireland near the sea, only one mile from where I grew up - that's good, since I've known many of my neighbours for between 50-60 years. Gordon and I play chess every day, and we are both equally bad. We play chatty, over-talkative bad bridge with friends every week.
Maeve Binchy
#30. I have an irregular heartbeat, so that means a fair amount of medication - and I have blood pressure pills, too, but no vitamins or supplements.
Maeve Binchy
#31. She soon called a halt to the work. Judy's great success was that she stopped her helpers before they got tired.
Maeve Binchy
#32. She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren't ready then, they were now.
Maeve Binchy
#33. Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.
Maeve Binchy
#34. Success is not like a cake that needs to be divided. It's more like a heap of stones - a cairn. If someone is successful, they add a stone to the cairn. It gets very high and can be seen from all over the world. That's how I see it.
Maeve Binchy
#35. Never mind money; the gifts of time and skill call into being the richest marketplace in the world.
Maeve Binchy
#36. The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.
Maeve Binchy
#37. I suppose, to be fair, I don't miss the energy of youth very much - because I was never fit. So it doesn't matter not being able to walk miles, striding the countryside, taking deep breaths and enjoying the scenery. That was never on my agenda.
Maeve Binchy
#38. An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
Maeve Binchy
#39. Happiness is in our own hearts. I have no regrets of anything in the past. I'm totally cheerful and happy, and I think that a lot of your attitude is not in the circumstances you find yourself in, but in the circumstances you make for yourself.
Maeve Binchy
#40. I do try to live every day as if it were my last, and it has worked for me so far.
Maeve Binchy
#41. Wasn't it hard that you did so much for children and loved them so deeply and they seemed so indifferent to you in return?
Maeve Binchy
#42. I think I'm brave because I've made decisions based - I hope not entirely selfishly - on what I think is right for me to do next.
Maeve Binchy
#43. I'm particularly fond of boned chicken breasts with a little garlic under the flesh and cooked in a casserole for 40 minutes with a jar of olives, some cherry tomatoes and a spoonful of olive oil.
Maeve Binchy
#44. Who knows what light housework means? One nun's light could be another nun's penal servitude.
Maeve Binchy
#45. Women who start out as ugly ducklings don't become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.
Maeve Binchy
#46. The day she realized that there were many ways to go, and Mother's was only one way. Not necessarily the right way, and not at all the wrong way. Just one of the many ways ahead.
Maeve Binchy
#47. I didn't have a sweet tooth, but I liked butter, and I liked sauces, and I liked wine ... and curry ... and cheeses.
Maeve Binchy
#48. I was just lucky I lived in this time of mass-market paperbacks.
Maeve Binchy
#49. There are no makeovers in my books. The ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems.
Maeve Binchy
#51. She said that it was dangerous to try to know somebody too well. People should have their own reserves, she said, the places they went in their minds, where no one else should follow.
Maeve Binchy
#52. You can't lay down laws for what people think and hope.
Maeve Binchy
#53. We asked our friends and relations to lend us their children, and, because we lived in London, children loved to come and stay for their half-term holidays.
Maeve Binchy
#54. I have always believed that life is too short for rows and disagreements. Even if I think I'm right, I would prefer to apologize and remain friends rather than win and be an enemy.
Maeve Binchy
#55. My mother was a trained nurse, and she'd tell me that patients would fight as they were administered anaesthetic, grappling to get the gas mask off their face.
Maeve Binchy
#56. In Ireland every place you visit and every person you meet has a story. And they love to tell you their stories. Everyone is interested in everything; in a land of storytellers, you will never be bored.
Maeve Binchy
#57. When I was younger, I avoided exercise or anything strenuous. I didn't even enjoy walking. As I got older, I spent so much time marking books or sitting at a desk writing that there was no room for exercise - not that I would have bothered anyway.
Maeve Binchy
#58. Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you've got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.
Maeve Binchy
#59. I've been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.
Maeve Binchy
#60. I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'
Maeve Binchy
#61. In my stories, whenever there's somebody wonderful and charming and bright and intelligent, that's me!
Maeve Binchy
#62. I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates ... or with big dogs.
Maeve Binchy
#63. Any one could write a book," said the taxi driver. " Yes, they could, but they DON'T," said Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy
#64. It was so silly to try to define things by words. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn't be tidied away with neat little labels. - Lena Gray
Maeve Binchy
#65. If you write what you know about, you will always be on safe ground. I am very edgy and nervous about going into territories I know nothing about. That's why you don't find much high finance, group sex, or yachting parties in my stories.
Maeve Binchy
#66. To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive
Maeve Binchy
#67. I've had a good life, full of more success and happiness than I ever expected.
Maeve Binchy
#68. He had not known it was possible to love a little human being as he loved Annie.
Maeve Binchy
#69. You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice.
Maeve Binchy
#70. I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.
Maeve Binchy
#71. Modern surgery has been like a miracle to those who thought the pain was going to go on forever.
Maeve Binchy
#72. I've seen a lot of people buy my books and then fall asleep on the plane soon afterwards.
Maeve Binchy
#73. Listen to me, Ria. It will be different when you and I have a home. It will be a real home, one that people will want to come running back to.
Maeve Binchy
#74. I love thriller writers. My favourites are Harlan Coban, Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Kathy Reichs and Ed McBain.
Maeve Binchy
#75. I have great family and good friends; the stories I told became popular, and people all over the world bought them.
Maeve Binchy
#76. If you had your time all over again ... ? She was keen to know.
You can't rewrite history. I have no idea what I'd do.
Maeve Binchy
#77. It was quite possible that she had lost the capacity to love and care anymore and that this is how she was going to be for the rest of her life.
Maeve Binchy
#78. Do you know the land where the lemon-trees blossom;where the golden oranges glow in the dark foliage'.
Maeve Binchy
#79. I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
Maeve Binchy
#80. I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation. I'm an escapist kind of writer.
Maeve Binchy
#81. If you don't go to a dance, you can never be rejected, but you'll never get to dance, either.
Maeve Binchy
#82. I remember watching myself on video and being so disappointed with myself because I was constantly moving around the place and laughing. I thought, 'I must be so much louder than I think I am. From inside it feels fine.'
Maeve Binchy
#83. When my sister Joan arrived, I asked if I could swap her for a rabbit. When I think what a marvellous friend she's been, I'm so glad my parents didn't take me at my word.
Maeve Binchy
#84. I'm pleased to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.
Maeve Binchy
#85. If you woke up each morning, and immediately dwelt on your ills, what sort of a day could you look forward to?
Maeve Binchy
#86. He thought about how life never turns out like you think and hope it will.
Maeve Binchy
#87. I couldn't have children, so that's the bad side. But compared to everything else I have, it's not all that terribly bad. I count my winners rather than my losers.
Maeve Binchy
#88. It's a funny old world. Once you realize that, you're halfway there.
Maeve Binchy
#89. Well. The term "frocky" was used a lot as a derogatory description for women that Eileen and Stephanie thought were dressing just to please male egos. Yet
Maeve Binchy
#90. I think you've got to play the hand that you're dealt and stop wishing for another hand.
Maeve Binchy
#92. I thought it must be desperate to be old. To wake up in the morning and remember that you were ancient - and so behave that way. I thought old people were full of aches and pains and horrible illnesses.
Maeve Binchy
#93. I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer.
Maeve Binchy
#94. Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen
Maeve Binchy
#95. I was lucky enough to be fairly quick at understanding what was taught, but unlucky enough not to be really interested in it, so I always got my exams but never had the scholar's love of learning for its own sake.
Maeve Binchy
#96. He called everyone sweetheart. There was nothing particularly special about it.
Maeve Binchy
#98. I was the big, bossy older sister, full of enthusiasms, mad fantasies, desperate urges to be famous, and anxious to be a saint - a settled sort of saint, not one who might have to suffer or die for her faith.
Maeve Binchy
#99. I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare;' I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning;' I say I 'passed a school'.
Maeve Binchy
#100. When I was being brought up, we weren't allowed to wallow in self-pity, which was a thoroughly good thing. We were all fine and healthy because that was what we were told to be.
Maeve Binchy
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