Top 100 Edna O'Brien Quotes
#1. We have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?
Edna O'Brien
#2. But we want young men. Romance. Love and things, I said, despondently.
Edna O'Brien
#4. The place was stifling. Suddenly it occurred to her that a trace of him still lurked in her, minute and spectral, that effluvial stain that would be her stigmata forever. It was then that she resolved to ask for an appointment to see him, as things had to be settled between them.
Edna O'Brien
#5. A stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.
Edna O'Brien
#6. Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.
Edna O'Brien
#7. People liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.
Edna O'Brien
#8. It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
Edna O'Brien
#9. You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with.
Edna O'Brien
#10. Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.
Edna O'Brien
#11. suddenly the window flew open, swung back and forth on its hinges, as if something was about to come in, and she waited in dread for what that something might be.
Edna O'Brien
#12. If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
Edna O'Brien
#14. There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.
Edna O'Brien
#15. It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
Edna O'Brien
#16. I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand ... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.
Edna O'Brien
#17. I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.
Edna O'Brien
#18. We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable ...
Edna O'Brien
#19. Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.
Edna O'Brien
#20. A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a pimp, before a husband is allowed to correct it," he said seething. "You would only tinker with it," she said fearless, though fearing.
Edna O'Brien
#21. After we had drunk the sherry I bought cider for us, and we were a little tipsy as we swayed on the high stools and looked out at the rain as it fell on the fields that shot past the train. But being tipsy we did not see very much and the rain did not touch us.
Edna O'Brien
#22. Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something.
Edna O'Brien
#23. Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget
Edna O'Brien
#25. When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.
Edna O'Brien
#26. Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all - the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness.
Edna O'Brien
#27. Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.
Edna O'Brien
#28. We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.
Edna O'Brien
#29. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#30. The players were mostly seated, itching to begin, impatient men shuffling the packs of cards, a center lamp on each table, and a hail of welcome as Cornelius entered.
Edna O'Brien
#31. Writers are always anxious, always on the run
from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
Edna O'Brien
#32. Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.
Edna O'Brien
#33. So many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.
Edna O'Brien
#34. History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.
Edna O'Brien
#36. Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.
Edna O'Brien
#37. Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.
Edna O'Brien
#38. It is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.
Edna O'Brien
#39. motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries.
Edna O'Brien
#40. Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.
Edna O'Brien
#41. Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things.
Edna O'Brien
#42. I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time ...
Edna O'Brien
#43. Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.
Edna O'Brien
#44. In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.
Edna O'Brien
#45. Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
Edna O'Brien
#46. Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk," she said. "It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can't truly be sociable.
Edna O'Brien
#47. her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both.
Edna O'Brien
#48. Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for.
Edna O'Brien
#49. I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.
Edna O'Brien
#50. The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit
Edna O'Brien
#51. Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Edna O'Brien
#52. It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.
Edna O'Brien
#53. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
Edna O'Brien
#55. I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be.
Edna O'Brien
#56. It was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.
Edna O'Brien
#57. She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company,
Edna O'Brien
#58. We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth.
Edna O'Brien
#59. The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
Edna O'Brien
#60. Only fools think that men and women love differently. Fools and pedagogues. I tell you, the love of men for women is just as heartbreaking, just as muddled, just as bewildering, and in the end, just as unfinished.
Edna O'Brien
#61. Brush those tears from your eyes
And try and realize
That from now on
I'll always be true.
I went away
But I didn't mean to stay
And I will regret it until my dying day.
Edna O'Brien
#62. After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.
Edna O'Brien
#63. It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.
Edna O'Brien
#64. My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.
Edna O'Brien
#65. I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
Edna O'Brien
#66. What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.
Edna O'Brien
#67. a mammy's boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.
Edna O'Brien
#68. I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
Edna O'Brien
#69. Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted.
Edna O'Brien
#70. Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.
Edna O'Brien
#71. When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
Edna O'Brien
#72. Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.
Edna O'Brien
#73. remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child.
Edna O'Brien
#74. holidays took the poisons out of everyday life.
Edna O'Brien
#75. Jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.
Edna O'Brien
#76. Love ... is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
Edna O'Brien
#78. On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation,
Edna O'Brien
#80. I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.
Edna O'Brien
#81. Fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.
Edna O'Brien
#83. Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri. "You have a wife," she had said.
Edna O'Brien
#84. What makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.
Edna O'Brien
#85. Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.
Edna O'Brien
#86. She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
Edna O'Brien
#87. She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere.
Edna O'Brien
#88. That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Edna O'Brien
#89. Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.
Edna O'Brien
#90. Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.
Edna O'Brien
#91. I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.
Edna O'Brien
#92. If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
Edna O'Brien
#93. lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other's names. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice, all the size of her, boasting about the presents their husbands gave them for their birthdays
Edna O'Brien
#94. A country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.
Edna O'Brien
#95. A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world. "You kilt it." "She kilt it." "I had no milk for it," she answered back.
Edna O'Brien
#96. I don't call it hate . . . I call it an awakening . . . you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife, and instead I get a schemer, plotting to pursue her own rotten ambition under the rubric of poetry . . . what a mockery, what a marriage.
Edna O'Brien
#97. For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.
Edna O'Brien
#98. When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season ...
Edna O'Brien
#99. All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.
Edna O'Brien
#100. I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.
Edna O'Brien
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
