Edna O'Brien Quotes

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

divide things equally between both children? If anything should happen to her she is appealing to him to honor this final wish. It is the first letter she has written to her husband in over fifty years, an admission that makes her choke back a tear. Fifty years. The golden jubilee that neither remembered. Fields let for grazing. No more the proud neighing thoroughbreds in the fields, the thoroughbreds on which his hopes centered

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

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

You're a right-looking eejit

Only fools think that men and women love differently. Fools and pedagogues. I tell you, the love of men for women is just as heartbreaking, just as muddled, just as bewildering, and in the end, just as unfinished.

August is a wicked month.

lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other's names. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice, all the size of her, boasting about the presents their husbands gave them for their birthdays

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

Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri. "You have a wife," she had said.

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

The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit

Oh dark woman
With a shawl and ribs
I could have served him better
With my shanties.
But men do love the shimmer
And so his ghost
Is hacked in half between us
The dark me and the dark you.

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.

motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries.

suddenly the window flew open, swung back and forth on its hinges, as if something was about to come in, and she waited in dread for what that something might be.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

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

That circular loop was fatal. Patsy giving them their Latin name, herpes zoster, describing how the pain attacked the line of the nerves, something Dilly knew beyond the Latin words when she had wept night after night, as they oozed and bled, when nothing, no tablet, no prayer, no interceding, could do anything for her, a punishment so acute that she often felt one half of her body was in mutiny against

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

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.

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

In the first dusk he walks back. Flowers and fallen confetti, from a wedding two days earlier, lie trodden on the wet grass and he knows in his heart that he is sure who he man was, but that nobody in the whole world, not even Tommy, not even Ivan, would believe him.

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

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

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

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.

A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world. "You kilt it." "She kilt it." "I had no milk for it," she answered back.

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

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

My mother is dead, my mother is dead," she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled,

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 ...

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

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

I don't call it hate . . . I call it an awakening . . . you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife, and instead I get a schemer, plotting to pursue her own rotten ambition under the rubric of poetry . . . what a mockery, what a marriage.

A stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

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

We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth.

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

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.

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

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.

Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.

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.

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

Solveig was higher up than me. She had a white apron. She was the cook. Sieving and singing hymns that her pastor in Sweden had taught her. Her eyes were the beautiful twinkling blue of a sleeping doll.

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things." short story "Sister Imelda

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

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

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

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.

Is that Rococo, Pascal?" Chrissie said as she stood by the missus's desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. "Oh, don't touch there or you'll be shot," Pascal said, because it was where the missus kept her souvenirs, love letters from men before him, locks of hair, dried shamrock, and the words of songs that she rehearsed for her parties. Her family was musical,

Jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

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 withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for.

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

Dilly, do not ever forget your own people." My brother came with me to wait for the mail car. He took off his brown scapulars and gave them to me, it being his way of saying goodbye. "In your letters, better not mention politics," he said. He had a secret life from us, he was a Croppy Boy, so many young men were, but dared not speak of it for fear of informers.

But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something ...

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.

Brush those tears from your eyes
And try and realize
That from now on
I'll always be true.
I went away
But I didn't mean to stay
And I will regret it until my dying day.

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

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

In the bodily garden the apple lurks.

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

Love ... is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

holidays took the poisons out of everyday life.

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

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

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.

THE TWO OTHER GIRLS in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain,

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.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

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

Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all - the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness.

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.

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

The words ran away with me.

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