Anne Enright - The Gathering (2007)

12 Sourced Quotes

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We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

Anne Enright
I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

Anne Enright
Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

Anne Enright
Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

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.

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.

Anne Enright
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking

Anne Enright
There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

Anne Enright
There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.

Anne Enright
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.

Anne Enright
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.

Anne Enright
There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.

Anne Enright