Maggie O'Farrell · 277 pages
Rating: (21.4K votes)
“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this....her leaving walk.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“Two women in a room. One seated, one standing”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied "Good" and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“It was always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooing, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“ear, ‘did you know that two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Maggie O'Farrell
Born place: Coleraine, Ireland
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“There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Under Heaven
“I’m the King, and I say you go to the dungeon instead of fighting wizards, and no argument.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, quote from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles
“He's really sweet, actually."
"I don't think we're talking about the same Sed. Sedric Lionheart. Tall guy. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes. Short black hair. Body befitting a Greek god. Sings. La la la la.”
― Olivia Cunning, quote from Rock Hard
“The man was so smooth he wouldn’t slide on an oil slick.”
― Faith Hunter, quote from Skinwalker
“Cat saliva contains a natural deodorant which is why they lick themselves a lot. It’s been proven by zoologists that cats that lick the smell off themselves survive longer and have more successful offspring. It’s also their way of hiding themselves from predators like large snakes, lizards and other larger carnivorous mammals.”
― James Bowen, quote from A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets
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