Anne Enright Quotes

I sometimes find reality far more fantastical and unlikely than what I could just make up.

My life is extraordinary because it's so normal, but it's so 'extra' for some reason.

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.

All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

Without the existence of the opposite, the concept has no meaning.

The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.

I know that I am very much like everybody else, but not really.

Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don't.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

There's two heads to every coin.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Each time I see the Upside-Down Man Standing in the water, I look at him and start to laugh, Although I shouldn't oughtter. For maybe in another world Another time Another town, Maybe HE is right side up And I am upside down

Something I owe to the soil that grew-More to the life that fed-But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides of my head. I would go without shirt or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.

You have to show the negative to show the positivity that comes from it.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

He was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary.

Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.

I wanted to be, you know, just no different than anybody else.