Edna O'Brien Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

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

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

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

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.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

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.

...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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

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

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

literature is the last banquet between minds.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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