Maeve Binchy Quotes

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

I'll understand if you don't want me. But I will be heartbroken. You are all I ever dreamed of and hoped for. You are much, much more. Please know that I didn't think I was mean-minded. But I realize I am. I don't want you to put your arms around me and say it's all right, that you forgive me. I want you to be sure that you do, and my love for you will last as long as I live. I can see no lightness, no humour, no joke to make. I just hope that we will be able to go back to when we had laughter, and the world was coloured, not black and white and grey. I am so sorry for hurting you. I could inflict all kinds of pain on myself, but it would not take back any I gave to you. - David Power

We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways. I also believe very, very strongly that everybody is the hero/heroine of his/her own life. I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters

I look placid, you see, that's why people think I'm fine. Inside I worry a lot.

Any one could write a book," said the taxi driver. "Yes, they could, but they DON'T," said Maeve Binchy

She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren't ready then, they were now.

It was so silly to try to define things by words. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn't be tidied away with neat little labels." - Lena Gray

If you had your time all over again....? She was keen to know. You can't rewrite history. I have no idea what I'd do.

Writing is a bit like going on a diet; you should either tell everyone or no one.

Who knows what light housework means? One nun’s light could be another nun’s penal servitude.

It’s a funny old world. Once you realize that, you’re halfway there.

You can’t marry an ungenerous man; there’s no joy in his soul.

Wasn’t it hard that you did so much for children and loved them so deeply and they seemed so indifferent to you in return?

But an intelligent man like you would know that to live in an unrealistic hope is a very foolish way to spend a life." - Lena Gray

Listen to me, Ria. It will be different when you and I have a home. It will be a real home, one that people will want to come running back to.

How will I explain it all … to everybody?” “You know, people don’t have to explain things nearly as much as you think they do.

Is there anything more harsh in this life than to be misjudged, and have one’s motives entirely misunderstood?

Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy—

She said that it was dangerous to try to know somebody too well. People should have their own reserves, she said, the places they went in their minds, where no one else should follow.

The day she realized that there were many ways to go, and Mother’s was only one way. Not necessarily the right way, and not at all the wrong way. Just one of the many ways ahead.

do you know the land where the lemon-trees blossom;where the golden oranges glow in the dark foliage''.

...And he said nothing. Just put his arms around her more closely as the whole heart clinic and their friends and relations danced to the music of "Hey Jude".

It was true what they had been saying: if people remember you, then you're not dead. It was very comforting.

Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen

It was quite possible that she had lost the capacity to love and care anymore and that this is how she was going to be for the rest of her life.

well. The term “frocky” was used a lot as a derogatory description for women that Eileen and Stephanie thought were dressing just to please male egos. Yet

She soon called a halt to the work. Judy's great success was that she stopped her helpers before they got tired.

He thought about how life never turns out like you think and hope it will.

In my experience, lights at the end of the tunnel tend to flicker out.

There were women who fussed about their homes as if they thought life were a permanent examination where they would be found wanting.

It’s what people do is important, not what they say or feel.

Problems don’t solve themselves neatly like that, due to a set of coincidences. Problems are solved by making decisions. Erika had always said that, and he had thought she was being doctrinaire. But it was true. Deciding not to change anything was a decision in itself. He hadn’t fully understood this before.

He called everyone sweetheart. There was nothing particularly special about it.

The rage she felt was a real thing, you could almost take it out of her and see it, like a red mist.

God, Benny, don’t blow your nose like that in the church. You’d lift half the congregation out of their seats,” Patsy warned.

Benny knew she was sounding very peculiar but conversation of any kind made her feel less anxious. It filled that great empty echo chamber of anxiety she felt

Her life was like her house—a colorful fantasy where anything was possible if you wanted it badly enough.

A silly idea about a book of blessings couldn’t really work. Not seriously.

He had not known it was possible to love a little human being as he loved Annie.

Maeve Binchy

There was no way of telling the story without paraphrasing it as a Maeve Binchy novel.

Eve showed Aidan how to rake the range. “I think when we’re married we might have something more modern,” he grumbled. “No, surely with the eight children we can have them stoking it, going up the chimney even.

far, although husbands who have terrible accidents are usually received warmly (extra points if he dies, and she finds love again). Maeve Binchy is popular for a while, until Margene, who in another life had been an investment

Books saw her through the pupal stage of thirteen to sixteen, frowning at Kafka and Woolf, then tearing through John Irving and Maeve Binchy, widely read in the proper sense, making no distinction between Jilly Cooper and Edith Wharton. There were stories on film and TV and, a little later, in the rolling melodrama of the internet, but those were team activities, noisy and social. Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.

2. Men like women without make-up. They don’t. They like extremely well and carefully made-up women whose skin has that expensive cultured look which comes from three hours at the dressing table. A woman who is really without make-up would frighten them to death. They regard blotches as eczema, and uneven colouring as a sign of tertiary syphilis.

What part of the human mind or body was so inefficient that it could make you think you loved someone so wildly unsuitable?

I don’t think we should spend any time wandering around that remote possibility. It’s nice of you to wish me well, but actually I find it unbearably patronizing.

She told them to read a poem every day and think about it, and whenever they went to a new place, to find out about its history and what had made it the place it had become.

Most people had nobody to share excitements and to celebrate with.

people don’t have to explain things nearly as much as you think they do.

Out by that ocean, you feel smaller, less important, somehow; it puts things into proportion

how much better Guinness tasted when drunk by the River Liffey in great quantities.

To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive

Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn't hang around --she'd try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn't cope she'd have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realize that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother's mind was like a hermetically sealed box in a vault of a bank.

There are some things that are neither right nor wrong. You can’t have rules laid down for. Would you understand that?” “Yes,” Clare said immediately, “I would. Like the Holy Ghost.” “Like what?” “Like the Holy Ghost. We have to believe in Him without understanding Him. He’s not a bird and He’s not a great wind. He’s something though, and that should be enough without understanding it.” “I don’t think that’s the same at all,” said Agnes, troubled. “But if it helps you to understand the problems of trade in a small town, then for heaven’s sake, use

the situation. First time in the country and she had found St. Jarlath’s Crescent with no difficulty. “You must be Noel. I hope I’m not too early for the household.” “No, we were all up. We’re about to go to work, you see, and you are very welcome, by the way.” “Thank you. Well, shall I come in and say hello and good-bye to them?” Noel realized that he might have left her forever on the doorstep, but then he was only half awake. It took him until about eleven a.m., when he had his first vodka and Coke, to be fully in control of the day. Noel was absolutely certain that nobody at Hall’s knew of his morning injection of alcohol and

He smiled at her, handsome Alan, who was always used to getting his own way. He hadn’t changed. Alan, who was already as faithless to Cinta as he had been to her. Suddenly, like a focus in binoculars, everything became clear. This was a man worth spending not one more minute thinking about, second-guessing or trying to understand.

There had been wonderful news from the convent. Mother Clare had broken her hip. Not that Mother Frances called it wonderful news, but it did mean that she would need to be near a hospital and physiotherapy, and all the stairs and the walking in St. Mary's wouldn't be advisable. Mother Frances was in the middle of the thirty days prayer when this happened. She told Eve that it was her biggest crisis of faith yet. Could the prayer be too powerful?

Angela was being reassuring. Someone must have been getting at the child. Wouldn’t you think they’d be delighted to see someone try to get on? Give some encouragement and support. But it had never been the way. “I do worry a bit. I don’t want to be abnormal.” Clare was solemn. “Well, I hope you’re not bigheaded enough to think that you’re something special. That would be a sin of Pride you know.” “I suppose so.” “You can know it, not suppose it. It’s there in black and white in the catechism. The two great sins against Hope are Pride and Despair. You mustn’t get drawn toward either of them.

Here, you can read the letter. . . . See if you know what he wants. See if you know what I’m meant to do.” Angela didn’t reach out to take the ill-written pages on their lined paper. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. There was a silence for a while. “I don’t need to read the letter. I know what he wants,” Angela said eventually. “He wants you to make the decisions. He wants you to take on the responsibility.” Clare was surprised. “Why?” “Because you’re not Chrissie, who wouldn’t know what day it was, and you’re not your mother who would cry her eyes out, and you’re not your father who would get into a temper and you’re not Ben and Jim who are too young to be taken into account. And because you’re bright and got a scholarship, that’s going to fit you and make you ready for any burden from now on.

Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.

respectability with overtones of

Do you set out to avoid it, the love thing?” “No, but I do set out not to be made a fool of and not to compromise. I’ve seen too much of that.

buy a greenhouse and

if your heart is elsewhere, would you not want to follow your destiny?

They are just thoughts, like anyone has thoughts, that’s all.

have to stay in a hotel once you book in. I don’t think you can leave at teatime and say that’s enough. Maybe they didn’t do it at all, maybe they only held hands and necked.

It ended badly. As everything Helen Doyle had ever touched seemed to end.

No, that can’t be so.’ ‘Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.’ ‘Oh please, may I have said something less banal. Please!

She looked nice, he thought, when she was being enthusiastic and cheering him up, she looked young herself. It was when her face was discontented that she developed the pouting, double-chinned look of her mother—a woman who had been born disagreeable and lived to make life disagreeable for everyone round her until last year when she got a coronary right in the middle of complaining that she hadn’t got enough presents for her seventieth birthday.

There are some things that are neither right nor wrong. You can’t have rules laid down for. Would you understand that?” “Yes,” Clare said immediately, “I would. Like the Holy Ghost.” “Like what?” “Like the Holy Ghost. We have to believe in Him without understanding Him. He’s not a bird and He’s not a great wind. He’s something though, and that should be enough without understanding it.” “I don’t think that’s the same at all,” said Agnes, troubled. “But if it helps you to understand the problems of trade in a small town, then for heaven’s sake, use it.

Nolan said his mother had got a bit better about things and that she had agreed to go away next summer for a holiday by the sea. Nolan’s whole family had been wanting to do this for ages but his mother had always said the seaside was full of rats and beetles and sea snakes. St. Patrick had only got rid of the land snakes according to Nolan’s mother, but he had no power over the huge snakes calling themselves eels which came in on beaches all over the country.

disappearing around a bend into the dusk. She’ll walk to Marbella, the humour she’s in, Valerie thought glumly, making her way back up the garden to the terracotta terrace. She would have liked to pour herself a big glass of fruity red wine and get smashed but she wouldn’t drink knowing that her granddaughter was asleep inside, and Briony was scorching along the beach in a temper, having given Valerie no indication as to what time she’d be back. That damn letter. She’d forgotten all about it. Tessa had given it to Valerie’s mother, Carmel, some time after

Now when she had been hoping for a cigarette and a look at the paper she had to waltz this ridiculous nun downtown to buy a postcard or whatever it was she wanted. “Why don’t they allow you out on your own, Mother? I’m delighted to accompany you of course, but I’ve often wondered.” “It’s part of our Rule,” Immaculata said smugly. Angela felt like punching her in the face. “Are they afraid you’ll make a run for it?” she asked. “Hardly, Miss O’Hara.” “Well there must be some reason but I suppose we’ll never know.” “We rarely question the Rule.” “No, I suppose you don’t. That’s where you have my wholehearted admiration. I’d question it from morning to night.” The nun gave a tinny little laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you would, Miss O’Hara.

She sat icy and withdrawn. She had hoped he would touch her, put his arms around her. Now she felt she would kill him if he tried.

open, the light streaming in in a harsh triangle, Henry’s face was

Herkes gerçekten istediği şeyin peşinden gidebilecek kadar cesur olsa, dünya bambaşka bir yer olurdu...

Birisini sevince onu değiştirmeye kalkmak yanlış bir şeydi.

Sanırım sonunda büyüdüğümü ve herkesi memnun etmenin imkânsız olduğunu anladım. Ben de onun yerine kendimi mutlu etmeye karar verdim.

Bazen nasıl olur, bilirsin. Bazen hiçbir şeyin anlamı olmaz. Hiçbir şeyin

İnsanların başkalarını kendi kusurları yüzünden suçlamalarını çok duydum.

Ireland. Monica had no

İnsanlar kendi uğraşlarını kendileri seçmeli, kendi yıldızlarının peşinden gitmeli.

Derdinin üzerine biraz ışık düşür, tıpkı çiçekler gibi dertlerin de ışığa ve havaya ihtiyacı vardır.

Artık her şeyin eskisi gibi olmasını beklemekten vazgeçip olanları kabullenmenin zamanı gelmişti.

What's a Sinbad?

her!

Why should I apologise for being utterly honest from the start, telling you the score, telling you the truth, coming to meet your parents, calling them to say I was worried that you didn't answer your phone. Are these the actions of some kind of shit? No, I think they're what a man who loves you might do.

home early, Liam?

she didn’t remember much else.

Turkish Bath

watched

Dr. Morrissey had always said that we found excuses to put off doing something that would take our minds off our worries. It was as if we didn’t want to lose the luxury of worrying.

Noel had decided that the very best way to cope with things not being so great was not to think about them at all. It had worked well so far. Why

She described the work as Girl Friday; it was, in fact, Dogsbody, which scanned perfectly, and after all, words mean what you want them to mean. These

Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.

anyway, encouraging her daughter in breaking up another man’s family, having the baby of a married man? Some help and example she must have been to Bernadette if this is the way things turned out. But then Ria realized that it could not have been what that woman wanted for her daughter either. Possibly she had been horrified by it all as Ria would be horrified if her own Annie were to get involved with a middle-aged married man. Possibly the mother hadn’t been told that Danny was married at the start. And had then become suspicious. Suddenly Ria remembered the woman who had telephoned her, the voice demanding to know if she was Mrs. Danny Lynch. This was the woman. Danny had concocted some cock-and-bull story at the time, but had later admitted it. Ria would have done the same if Annie were to be involved with a married man. She would have called the house to check if his wife really existed. To speak to the enemy. This woman probably loved her daughter too. She would have wished for a boyfriend who was young and single. But who could know what a daughter was going to do? Was seeing Bernadette better than not seeing her? She sat in the car biting her lip and wondering. Possibly better. It meant that now there was no more imagining. It had cleared that area of speculation from her mind. It didn’t make it any more bearable that she was so young. Or forgivable. There was a knock on the car window and Ria jumped. For a mad moment she thought Bernadette and her mother were about to confront her. But it was the anxious face of a traffic warden. “You were not even thinking about

dinner in their house. As she walked along the canal, Moira saw a small man surrounded by dogs walking towards her. It was Noel’s father, Charles Lynch, marching along with dogs of different sizes and shapes: a spaniel, a poodle and a miniature schnauzer trit-trotting on their leads on one side and a huge Great

I’m surprised you didn’t have her in white with half a dozen trainbearers,” Louis said under his breath. Lena flashed him a smile as if he had said something warm and encouraging instead of sneering. Ivy was very quick on the uptake, she would notice if Lena glowered.

that Dr. Morrissey had always said that we found excuses to put off doing something that would take our minds off our worries. It was as if we didn’t want to lose the luxury of worrying.