Edna O'Brien Quotes & Sayings

But we want young men. Romance. Love and things, I said, despondently. — Edna O'Brien

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment. — Edna O'Brien

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

I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

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

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart. — Edna O'Brien

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love. — Edna O'Brien

Writing is like carrying a fetus. — Edna O'Brien

What matters is the imaginative truth. — Edna O'Brien

motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries. — Edna O'Brien

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps. — Edna O'Brien

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye. — Edna O'Brien

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

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women. — Edna O'Brien

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

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it. — Edna O'Brien

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

On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, — Edna O'Brien

remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child. — Edna O'Brien

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

THE TWO OTHER GIRLS in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain, — Edna O'Brien

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

Writers are always anxious, always on the run
from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world. — Edna O'Brien

Promiscuity is the death of love. — Edna O'Brien

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

Jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal. — Edna O'Brien

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

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

We have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey? — Edna O'Brien

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

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

holidays took the poisons out of everyday life. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork. — Edna O'Brien

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation. — Edna O'Brien

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love. — Edna O'Brien

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

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed. — Edna O'Brien

Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts. — Edna O'Brien

I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man. — Edna O'Brien

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

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it. — Edna O'Brien

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. — Edna O'Brien

Fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment. — Edna O'Brien

Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty. — Edna O'Brien

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it. — Edna O'Brien

It was Fidelma's favourite walk, a winding path by the river in the Castle grounds. The Castle with its turrets and ivied walls was a five-star hotel which attracted celebrities and regulars who came for the fishing and shooting. She could do that walk in her sleep, over the bridge, down three steps, by a sign that read 'Please Close the Gate' and all of a sudden the sound of the river, squeezing its way under the bridge and then bursting out as it opened into a wide sweep, making its way upstream, girdling the small islands that it passed. The sound was like water bursting in childbirth, or so a woman who had had many children once told her, and she remembered it. — Edna O'Brien

most prized of all, her secretaire, a Napoleon III desk, full of nooks and crannies and pigeonholes, — Edna O'Brien

Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things. — Edna O'Brien

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

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?' — Edna O'Brien

Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

You're a right-looking eejit — Edna O'Brien

FOR THREE NIGHTS in a row, Dilly has dreamed of Gabriel, a look of yearning on his face, the clothes hanging off him, making no attempt to come to her and yet making his presence felt, standing on an empty road, like he was waiting. Three nights in a row. "It must mean that he's trying to reach you," Sister says. "It doesn't," Dilly answers — Edna O'Brien

The difference in their age had begun to matter, she had just turned forty and Jack was in his sixties, no longer the 'Brooding Heathcliff' that used to sign birthday cards to her. He wanted less and less to meet people, keeping her to himself, shutting the world out, drawing the heavy velvet curtains too early on a bright evening. If she announced that they might invite a few friends, he worried, began to wonder what time these friends might arrive and more importantly, what time they would leave. — Edna O'Brien

We were a bookish family. we loved our books, but before long they were lined up next to the stove and my mother and my uncle fought over which should go first and which should be saved to the very last. The Iliad was a beautiful first edition, the pride of our library, but it too went: Agamemnon, king of men, Nestor, flower of Achaean chivalry, the Black Ships, Patroclus' corpse, Helen's bracelets, Cassandra's shrieks, all met the flames, for he sake of two or three suppers. My uncle was loath to let Mark Twain go...Huckleberry Finn and his river did not deserve such an ignominious end. — Edna O'Brien

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin — Edna O'Brien

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center
that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact. — Edna O'Brien

It was no longer her sleeping room, it was our sleeping room now. We made friends the night it thundered, big claps of it and forked lightning flared then sizzled inside the room, she cowering under my bed, terrified that Eric Eric, the man with the clapper who broke up the big ships in the harbor in Malmo, was coming for her. — Edna O'Brien

Dilly, do not ever forget your own people." My brother came with me to wait for the mail car. He took off his brown scapulars and gave them to me, it being his way of saying goodbye. "In your letters, better not mention politics," he said. He had a secret life from us, he was a Croppy Boy, so many young men were, but dared not speak of it for fear of informers. — Edna O'Brien

Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down. — Edna O'Brien

Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something. — Edna O'Brien

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

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed. — Edna O'Brien

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

divide things equally between both children? If anything should happen to her she is appealing to him to honor this final wish. It is the first letter she has written to her husband in over fifty years, an admission that makes her choke back a tear. Fifty years. The golden jubilee that neither remembered. Fields let for grazing. No more the proud neighing thoroughbreds in the fields, the thoroughbreds on which his hopes centered — Edna O'Brien

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart. — Edna O'Brien

The words ran away with me. — Edna O'Brien

I wish you'd come for six months. I seem to have got a big burst of energy writing this whereas sometimes I haven't enough strength to hold pen or pencil. You will find that one day as you get older. I worry about you and your traveling to the different places. Nowhere is safe now. My undying love to you. — Edna O'Brien

She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company, — Edna O'Brien

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season ... — Edna O'Brien

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt. — Edna O'Brien

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up. — Edna O'Brien

There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes. — Edna O'Brien

Shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

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

You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it. — Edna O'Brien

But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something ... — Edna O'Brien

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

Is that Rococo, Pascal?" Chrissie said as she stood by the missus's desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. "Oh, don't touch there or you'll be shot," Pascal said, because it was where the missus kept her souvenirs, love letters from men before him, locks of hair, dried shamrock, and the words of songs that she rehearsed for her parties. Her family was musical, — Edna O'Brien

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

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son. — Edna O'Brien

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

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

It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless. — Edna O'Brien

You have to be lonely to be a writer — Edna O'Brien

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. — Edna O'Brien

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. — Edna O'Brien