Edna O'Brien Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
Just say I was born in the mid-30s.... If I die and you write my obituary, don't give my age.

Edna O'Brien
She looks like her eyes have been taken out and deep-fried.

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

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
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
Shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

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 am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

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

Edna O'Brien
I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them.

Edna O'Brien
I'm very steadfast is the word. The idea that one crawls in and out of bed is so crass. I believe in love, not promiscuity, and they don't go together. I am a romantic. We're very wise in our minds, but in our hearts we're very turbulent.

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
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
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 with other 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
On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation.

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
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
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
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 know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.

Edna O'Brien
Every day in Ireland, or at least every week, there's another story of a baby found on a river bank or of some dark, covert, incestuous family. An abortion must be such a painful and excruciating decision that to combine it then with half a community jumping down your neck telling you you're dealing in murder, I think that's awful.

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