This Must Be the Place Quotes

“What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“...how different it all might have been, how minuscule the causes and how devastating their effects.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“Claudette looks down at the thing in her hand. She turns it one way and the other. It is a packet of Italian coffee, half used, left behind. Innocuous enough in itself but in Claudette’s hands, this particular morning, it is as dangerous as cyanide.

She isn’t going to sniff it, no, she isn’t. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt such a thing. Just a whiff of those smoky, dark, aromatic granules – heated up they always were, at length, lovingly, every morning in this kitchen, for all the years he lived here, the way he would stand waiting for them to brew, looking out of that window, that robe of his loose over his pyjamas, a child, usually, on his shoulder or his arm – would be enough to tip her over the edge. She isn’t going to do it.

Certainly not.

Then she does, of course. She removes the clip, she places it on the counter, she parts the top of the silver-and-red packet and she brings it to her face and she inhales, she inhales, she inhales.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“Soil is memory made flesh, is past and present combined: nothing goes away.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it. Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She’d said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you’re describing comes of growing up, but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not? Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. 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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“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.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“There’s no one more joyless than a drinkless drunk.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“(A strange comfort it had been, to find a word for the very thing that lies in the core of your being, in the most secret alleyway of the heart.)”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“She thought, too, about how she’d read somewhere that the only language that had a word for existences, lives such as theirs, was Romany. Detlene, they called them. The wandering souls of miscarried or stillborn children. Those who had undeniably lived but only within their mother.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“She yanks open the fridge to find an etiolated carrot, a hunk of spore-covered cheese, some curdled milk.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“There was something that set apart a man who had grown up among women—a strong mother and a clutch of sisters, in Daniel’s case—from a man who hadn’t. Men of this ilk were, in Nicola’s opinion, much more evolved and therefore made much better lovers.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“My relief at her touch verges on indescribable. I don’t think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair, as I dive inside her coat and press her form to mine. What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“Can we help you with something?” The question comes from close behind him and is not really a question at all, conveying as it does the exact opposite of its semantic implication. Does that, Daniel finds himself wondering before he turns around, count as a rhetorical question? Not really. It doesn’t contain rhetoric, merely threat. There ought, he feels, to be a special linguistic coinage for this type of inquiry. One that purports to be helpful but is anything but.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“This house has an odd habit of returning to the atmosphere of its former destitute and deserted state: I never forget, it seems to say, if we’ve been away for longer than a day or so, my stones and mortar are steeped in decades of human neglect.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“I had, I now see, been counting on a little more bonhomie,”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“coshed by boredom.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“My heart has taken it upon itself to perform a series of trips or tricks inside my rib cage: a type of cardiac pratfall. It has decided to miss or stumble over every tenth or eleventh beat. The effect is one of unremitting anxiety, interspersed with spikes of panic. I have to press my hand to my chest, as if to reassure my heart, to tell it to behave. Sweat prickles along my hairline, inside my collar. I’m fine, I tell myself, tell my heart, We’re fine.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“Todd takes drugs at times like this not so much because of the tidal push and pull of the chemical craving, although there is that, but because he likes to test if he can. If he can pull it off. He gets almost as much of a kick from seeing if he can get away with it as he does from the drug itself. Can he stand in a room of an appallingly expensive, stupendously ridiculous charade of a party, full of self-satisfied people his parents’ age—doctors, lawyers, military men, auctioneers—and pop some pharmaceutical products without one of them having the faintest inkling what he is up to?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“What to do, which way to go? Climb the aspens, splash through the stream, feed the hens, visit the tree house, head for the tire swing, build a fire, go to the fairy den that Ari made for her last summer, search for smooth pebbles in the water butt, find one of those reeds that Lucas knows how to pierce in the right place to make a music pipe. The world seems to Marithe to be suddenly crammed, overloaded, a spectrum of possibilities. How can she choose just one, how can she ever decide which way to turn, when the place is so full, so teeming with choice? There is a fire raging somewhere within her, it seems, and none of these things can put it out.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“factotum.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“I don’t know why I’m thinking of Stella all of a sudden and why I’m feeling so strange. Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow, like the people up there watching the game, and the real me has gone off somewhere on its own. Dissociation, my brother said, that time when I told him I get like this sometimes. “Dissociation” is the word.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place