Quotes by Edna O'brien - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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...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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Love
Like You
People
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Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Darkness
Doe
Light
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Children
Mets
Parent
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Death
Dog
Night
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... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Country
Flower
Stars
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Brain
Hands
Thinking
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never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Bees
Flower
Saffron
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There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Games
People
Real
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Brain
Flow
Bursts
Dam
In Fact
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Littles
Thieves
Writing
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Jesus
Hate
Mother
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Ordinary
People
Way
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Home
Men
Book
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Cells
People
Self
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Alive
Childhood
Fatherhood
Industrious
Obsessive
Trying
Besides
Recapture
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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?
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Back And Forth
Lasts
Lovers
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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?'
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Lovers
Forth
Remark
Tossed
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Space
Book
Chairs
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Fate
Individual
Novelists
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Fear
Animal
Knowing
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Different
Knowing
Persons
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Calling
Nurse
Training
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Children
Hair
Hands
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Beautiful
Flower
Love Is
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Country
Odds
Philosophy
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Heart
Secret
Self
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Cities
Kissing
Vastness
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Beautiful
Lonely
Mother
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Eye
Half
Landscape
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Men
Night
School
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Men
Book
Numbers
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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.
Edna O'brien / Novelist
Dream
Morning
Real
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