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I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.

Anne Enright

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Anne Enright
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Work
Construction
Much
Wearing
Think
Takes
Thinking
Quite
People
Social
Find
Thing
Going
Irish

More quotes by Anne Enright

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A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
Anne Enright
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For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
Anne Enright
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There's quite a big gap when it comes to that dual identity of mother and child, or even a pregnant woman, or a nursing woman. It kind of begs the question of that very strong Western idea of the individual self.
Anne Enright
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If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.
Anne Enright
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I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
Anne Enright
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Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
Anne Enright
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There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
Anne Enright
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You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
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Try to be accurate about stuff.
Anne Enright
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I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
Anne Enright
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No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.
Anne Enright
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Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.
Anne Enright
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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
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Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
Anne Enright
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Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.
Anne Enright
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I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
Anne Enright
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When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
Anne Enright
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If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
Anne Enright
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We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
Anne Enright
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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