Edna O'Brien Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

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

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

Edna O'Brien
She was a spasmodic selfless torrent like the fizz from her own cider bottles.

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

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

Edna O'Brien
Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.

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
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
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
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
IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

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

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

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

Edna O'Brien
I'm a good fighter. I stay the course. Part of it is to do with being a woman. I'm not being facetious. I think I am what Napoleon said about Madame de Sevigne. I think like a woman and write like a man. My books are very ferocious, though the language is well wrought.

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
Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

Edna O'Brien
Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

Edna O'Brien
I dislike the phone," she says. "I like faxes. They're gentle. They arrive like little sausages. All I have to do is pray to God — this elusive, 'question mark over His head' God — that when I start to write tomorrow, it will come.

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
It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

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
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
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