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Edna O'Brien Quotes
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If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
Edna O'Brien
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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
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Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.
Edna O'Brien
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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She looks like her eyes have been taken out and deep-fried.
Edna O'Brien
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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
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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
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I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy or in bed with a strange man.
Edna O'Brien
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I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.
Edna O'Brien
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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
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Shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.
Edna O'Brien
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[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
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I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.
Edna O'Brien
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We have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?
Edna O'Brien
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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
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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
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When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.
Edna O'Brien
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Edna O'Brien
Born:
December 15, 1930
(age 93)
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:
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