Edna O'Brien Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What matters is the imaginative truth.

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

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

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

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

The other me, who did not mean to drown herself, went under the sea and remained there for a long time. Eventually she surfaced near Japan and people gave her gifts but she had been so long under the sea she did not recognize what they were. She is a sly one. Mostly at night we commune. Night. Harbinger of dream and nightmare and bearer of omens which defy the music of words. In the morning the fear of her going is very real and very alarming. It can make one tremble. Not that she cares. She is the muse. I am the messenger.

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

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

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.

My hand does the work and I dont have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. Its 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

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.

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

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.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

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

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

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.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

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