Anne Enright Quotes

It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, every day.

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn't have to become who we are.

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

Shame is the turnkey that keeps our evil desires in jail.

I wanted to write a book about people who have the best intentions and think - really, truly think - that they're doing the right thing. And then they realize that when those ideals come knocking at their windowsill, a lot of times they will suddenly disavow those ideals.

When I try to be patient on my own, my patience is forced and short-lived. It is obvious to everyone that I am desperately trying to be patient.

I'm such an addictive personality that I can say yes or no.

I have tried to be that player who plays within himself, but I just can't do that.

Oh, I am an angel, though sometimes I wish I was more of a devil.

I think, on any given day, somebody could help out a homeless person and cuss out somebody that cut them off in traffic, and I think that everybody has that inside them: it's just how you live that balance - so I think everybody is 'Wretched and Divine.'

I'm not always a rat. Sometimes it just comes out.

It's a lot easier knowing you can't do something than knowing you shouldn't.

Playing somebody who's obsessed. Playing somebody who is transgressing, and who is really crossing moral lines and ethical lines. That's always interesting.

There is good and evil in each of us, and you can easily be led to the dark side.

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

I think that if more people saw more things, they wouldn't be able to really help themselves.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horse back, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.

Temptation is not a sin but playing with temptation invites sin.