This Must Be the Place
Maggie O'Farrell
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”
“We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.”
“If she was liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her; if she was a pill, she would down her'; if she was a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean.”
“I think about her as she is in front of me, in her weird overalls and woolen socks and fancy leather slippers. I wonder if she still wears that Indian shawl around the house, if she still drinks hot water with a spoonful of some honey that she claims has miraculous, antiviral, immortality-giving properties, whether she still plays the piano late at night and insists on cooking pasta in not-quite-boiling water because she’s too impatient to wait. I wonder whether she still crashes the gears on the car as she’s driving but denies all knowledge of this. I wonder if there is anything of mine that she’s kept, any shirts, any books, any letters. I wonder if she still walks in her sleep and whether there is anybody there to get up, follow her, and lead her back to bed.”
“He thinks of his grief over his sister as an entity that is horribly and painfully attached to him, the way a jellyfish might adhere to your skin or a goitre or an abscess. He pictures it as viscid, amorphous, spiked, hideous to behold. He finds it unbelievable that no one else can see it. Don’t mind that, he would say, it’s just my grief. Please ignore it and carry on with what you were saying.”
“Do you think, Daniel,” she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, "that we might have reached the end of our story?”
“To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.”
“She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself.”
“It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.”
“I have a theory,’ she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, ‘that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.”
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Book Keywords:
motherhood, possibility, reality, love, parenting, progress
