Edna O'Brien Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

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
Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Edna O'Brien
The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

Edna O'Brien
This recollection, or whatever it is, invades me. It is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

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
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
Hemingway gave a great piece of advice about writing, which I follow. He said always finish when you're in a little bit of a flow, for the next bout.

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

Edna O'Brien
I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Edna O'Brien
Upstairs she lay awake and planned a new, heroic role for herself. She would expiate all her sins by sinking into domesticity.... she would put her lily hand down into sewerages and save him the trouble of lifting up the ooze and hairs and gray slime that resulted from their daily lives.

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

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
I didn't set out to denounce the I.R.A. That's too easy. I set out to explore the psyche. I think the situation in Ireland is England's doing, and we know that.

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
Fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

Edna O'Brien
[A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them.

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

Edna O'Brien
She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.

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

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

Edna O'Brien
After the rich, the most obnoxious people in the world are those who serve the rich.

Edna O'Brien