Edna O'Brien > Quotes

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“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, In the Forest

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
― Edna O'Brien

“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, Girl with Green Eyes

“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”
― Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners: Stories

“Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.”
― Edna O'Brien

“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, Lantern Slides: Short Stories

“...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, Girls in Their Married Bliss

“The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.”
― Edna O'Brien

“That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“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, Country Girl

“I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Lonely Girl

“Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“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, Country Girl

“It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“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, The Country Girls Trilogy 'the Country Girls', ' the Lonely Girl', 'Girls in Their Married Bliss

“Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“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

“After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“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

“Brush those tears from your eyes
And try and realize
That from now on
I'll always be true.
I went away
But I didn't mean to stay
And I will regret it until my dying day.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“الجسد يحوي الكثير من قصص الحياة تماما مثل المخ.”
― Edna O'Brien

“The words ran away with me.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“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, Saints and Sinners: Stories

“Oh dark woman
With a shawl and ribs
I could have served him better
With my shanties.
But men do love the shimmer
And so his ghost
Is hacked in half between us
The dark me and the dark you.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl