The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox Quotes

“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, 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, 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, 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, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, 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, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Two women in a room. One seated, one standing”
― Maggie O'Farrell, 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, 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, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“And Esme sees what might be. She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more. Then you must think yourself long. This is the tricky bit. Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head, until, ladies and gentlemen, until it comes to pass that—”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“April yields to March, then February, and meanwhile Iris reads of refusals to speak, of unironed clothes, of arguments with neighbours, of hysteria, of unwashed dishes and unswept floors, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way or seeking them elsewhere. Of husbands at the end of their tethers, of parents unable to understand the women their daughters have become, of fathers who insist, over and over again, that she used to be such a lovely little thing. Daughters who just don’t listen. Wives who one day pack a suitcase and leave the house, shutting the door behind them, and have to be tracked down and brought back.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Oh,’ she burst out. ‘I hate this—I hate it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Just—this. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m getting scared it might never come.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Esme turns. The wind steals her hair, flipping it above her head, streaking it over her face. There is the girl, sitting as Esme knew she would be, in the sand, legs crossed. She is watching her with that slightly anxious frown of hers. But no, Esme is wrong. She is not watching her, she is looking past her, towards the horizon. She is, Esme sees, thinking of the lover. This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family—her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents—from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme’s mother. 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, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“and when I first saw him I thought I might dissolve, like sugar in water.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Esme holds the cushion between both hands. Its fabric—a textured damask in a deep burgundy—is packed tight with foam stuffing. It has gold piping at its edges. She turns it over, then turns it back. She takes two steps across her sister’s room and she places it back on the sofa. She does this carefully, propping it against its twin, making sure it looks exactly as it did when she found it.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Kitty and Esme. Esme and Kitty. Chances all ruined. Wouldn’t let go of the baby. Mine all along but I know that you did. ‘I think I don’t know.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“The paraphernalia is astounding. They are girls who have spent their lives in nothing more than a cotton dress, and here are liberty bodices, vests, stockings, socks, skirts, underskirts, kilts, Fair Isle sweaters, blouses, hats, scarves, coats, gaberdines, all, seemingly, intended to be worn at once.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“That a man used to be able to admit his daughter or wife to an asylum with just a signature from a GP.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Firth of Forth.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“And she asks how the weather is today in Brisbane.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“What if, she always thinks. She has spent her life half strangled by what-ifs.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Life can have odd confluences. Esme will not say serendipity: she loathes the word. But sometimes she thinks there must be something at work, some impulse, some collision of forces, some kinks in chronology.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“The laughter. Erupting behind her during lessons, following her like a dress train as she walked down a corridor. Esme could never really tell why, what it was about her that afforded them such hilarity.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more. Then you must think yourself long. This is the tricky bit. Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head, until, ladies and gentlemen, until it comes to pass that—”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“And Esme sees what might be. She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“—terribly cold, I am. Terribly. I have to say I am not entirely sure where I am. But I don’t want anyone to know this so I shall sit tight and perhaps someone will—”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox