Top 100 Anne Enright Quotes
#1. He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.
'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?
Anne Enright
#2. Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.
Anne Enright
#3. Paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.
Anne Enright
#4. I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
Anne Enright
#5. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
Anne Enright
#6. You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.
Anne Enright
#7. Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
Anne Enright
#8. I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
Anne Enright
#9. When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
Anne Enright
#10. We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
Anne Enright
#11. There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.
Anne Enright
#13. She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday's weather.
Anne Enright
#14. I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
Anne Enright
#15. 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.
Anne Enright
#16. I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
Anne Enright
#17. Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
Anne Enright
#18. 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.
Anne Enright
#19. Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.
Anne Enright
#20. Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.
Anne Enright
#21. Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.
Anne Enright
#22. There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity.
Anne Enright
#23. The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
Anne Enright
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find
blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Anne Enright
#28. Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
Anne Enright
#29. The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.
Anne Enright
#30. Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad.
Anne Enright
#31. I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
Anne Enright
#32. The kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.
Anne Enright
#33. I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
Anne Enright
#34. No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.
Anne Enright
#35. I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
Anne Enright
#36. I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
Anne Enright
#37. To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
Anne Enright
#38. 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
#39. God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Anne Enright
#40. 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
#41. If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.
Anne Enright
#42. 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.
Anne Enright
#43. If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.
Anne Enright
#44. Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.
Anne Enright
#45. Has the rain a father ...
What womb brings forth the ice?
- Job: 38
Anne Enright
#46. I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
Anne Enright
#47. I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.
Anne Enright
#48. 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.
Anne Enright
#49. I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
Anne Enright
#50. I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad
Anne Enright
#51. I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
Anne Enright
#52. There often is a dark secret in books ... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.
Anne Enright
#54. People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
Anne Enright
#55. There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.
Anne Enright
#56. People do not change, they are merely revealed.
Anne Enright
#57. My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.
Anne Enright
#58. A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking
Anne Enright
#59. I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.
Anne Enright
#60. Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
Anne Enright
#61. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#62. Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Anne Enright
#63. I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept.
Anne Enright
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Anne Enright
#66. 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
#67. He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever.
Anne Enright
#68. People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.
Anne Enright
#69. I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
Anne Enright
#70. A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
Anne Enright
#71. All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it's like being looked at by an alien, or a cat - who knows what they see?
Anne Enright
#72. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#73. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
Anne Enright
#74. I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead
Anne Enright
#75. There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight-which was thought a little enthusiastic - and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.
Anne Enright
#76. I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
Anne Enright
#77. I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.
Anne Enright
#78. One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
Anne Enright
#79. It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.
Anne Enright
#80. For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
Anne Enright
#81. There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.
Anne Enright
#83. Up and down' is Irish for anything at all
from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
Anne Enright
#84. Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke.
Anne Enright
#85. Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A Nuisance.
Rosalene was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was incrasingly difficult. She made her children cry.
Anne Enright
#86. There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
Anne Enright
#87. It is not that the Hegartys don't know what they want, it is that they don't know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.
Anne Enright
#88. 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
#89. Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.
Anne Enright
#91. Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.
Anne Enright
#92. Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.
Anne Enright
#93. I write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day.
Anne Enright
#94. I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Anne Enright
#95. 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.
Anne Enright
#96. I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.
Anne Enright
#97. I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
Anne Enright
#98. I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most - a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.
Anne Enright
#99. It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
Anne Enright
#100. Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.
Anne Enright
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