Edna O'Brien Quotes

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

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

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

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

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

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

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

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

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

...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. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

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

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?

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.

August is a wicked month.

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

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

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.