Edna O'Brien quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edna O'Brien on Wise Famous Quotes.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

It was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things.

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

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.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.

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

August is a wicked month.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time ...

You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it.

So many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.

Everything hinged on money,

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

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.

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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

Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

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

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

most prized of all, her secretaire, a Napoleon III desk, full of nooks and crannies and pigeonholes,

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season ...

But we want young men. Romance. Love and things, I said, despondently.

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

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

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

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

A country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

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

motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries.

remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company,

her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

In the bodily garden the apple lurks.

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted.

You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with.

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

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

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.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

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.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

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.

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

Jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

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

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

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.

You're a right-looking eejit

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

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.

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

holidays took the poisons out of everyday life.

The words ran away with me.

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

You have to be lonely to be a writer