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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, The Gathering
There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
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, The Gathering
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.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
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 Gathering
I do not believe in evil--I believe that we are human and fallible, that we make things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
People do not change, they are merely revealed.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
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