Anne Enright quotes - page 3

There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts--they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared. (Anne Enright)
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require. View quote
Anne Enright
One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it. View quote
Anne Enright
And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see. View quote
Anne Enright
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since. View quote
Anne Enright
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)
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
There was a great buzz and sometimes I felt like awarding myself purple hearts for the work I was doing. View quote
Anne Enright
I remember rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Anne Enright