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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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Anne Enright
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 11
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Television Director
Television Producer
Writer
Dublin city
Way
Linger
People
Publicly
Immortality
Dead
Ways
Alive
Many
Different
Privately

More quotes by Anne Enright

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People do not change, they are merely revealed.
Anne Enright
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I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
Anne Enright
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I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
Anne Enright
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I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.
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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The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.
Anne Enright
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Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.
Anne Enright
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And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.
Anne Enright
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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
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To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
Anne Enright
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Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
Anne Enright
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I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
Anne Enright
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Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
Anne Enright
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When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
Anne Enright
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In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
Anne Enright
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I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
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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I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?
Anne Enright
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Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how real your story is, or how made up: what matters is its necessity.
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