Edna O'Brien Quotes
Top 87 wise famous quotes and sayings by Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Edna O'Brien on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget
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 ...
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.
from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.
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.
Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.
Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.
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.
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.
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 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.
When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.