Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien Quotes
65 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Writers are always anxious, always on the run — from the telephone, from people, from responsibilities, from the distractions of this world.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
[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
Source
Report...
I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy or in bed with a strange man.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.
Edna O'Brien
Source
Report...
After the rich, the most obnoxious people in the world are those who serve the rich.
Edna O'Brien
1
2
3
Quote of the day
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
Edna O'Brien
Born:
December 15, 1930
(age 91)
Bio:
Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the "doyenne" of Irish literature.
Known for:
The Little Red Chairs (2015)
The Country Girls (1960)
Country Girl (2012)
The Love Object (1968)
Girl with Green Eyes (1962)
Most used words:
love
,
people
,
books
,
write
,
woman
,
god
,
fear
,
heart
,
painful
,
hand
,
bed
,
die
,
leave
,
deep
,
over
Edna O'Brien on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Edna O'Brien Quotes
Edna O'Brien Short Quotes
Irish Biographer Quotes
Biographer Quotes
20th-century Biographer Quotes
20th-century Women
Women Biographers
Related People
James Joyce
Irish Novelist
Anne Enright
Irish Novelist
Colum McCann
Irish Journalist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes