Edna O'Brien

“The words ran away with me.”

— Edna O'Brien

August is a wicked month.

— Edna O'Brien

Promiscuity is the death of love.

— Edna O'Brien

“You're a right-looking eejit”

— Edna O'Brien

“Ice was precious.”

— Edna O'Brien

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

— Edna O'Brien

You have to be lonely to be a writer

— Edna O'Brien

“Everything hinged on money,”

— Edna O'Brien

“On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation,”

— Edna O'Brien

“he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.”

— Edna O'Brien

literature is the last banquet between minds.

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

“It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.”

— Edna O'Brien

“Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

“She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company,”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

“she goes out to the clothesline to hang a few things, his things, her things, and a load of tea cloths.”

— Edna O'Brien

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

— Edna O'Brien

“Your brother says he will sever all ties with us unless we do as he asks and sign Rusheen over to him.”

— Edna O'Brien

“so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her…

— Edna O'Brien

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

— 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

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

— Edna O'Brien

“The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far…

— Edna O'Brien

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then…

— Edna O'Brien

“she sees her life pass before her in rapid succession, like clouds, different shapes and different colors, merging, passing into one another,…

— Edna O'Brien

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual…

— Edna O'Brien

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is…

— Edna O'Brien

“Silage making is more practical than saving hay. When you watch an animal die you think how sad it must be to…

— Edna O'Brien

“It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between…

— Edna O'Brien

“they don’t talk at all only fight, the mother’s will was unclear, Edward got a field up the Commons that William wanted…

— Edna O'Brien

“like a bell at the interval in the theater, and we all stood up and formed an orderly line to go in…

— Edna O'Brien

“Mr. Coaxyoram himself and many a young girl soft on him, but oh, what a gentleman and from a scion of gentlemen.…

— Edna O'Brien

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center…

— Edna O'Brien

“The curtain of worldly desire must be ripped in half and I must look into my own soul and overcome the pit…

— Edna O'Brien

“My mother is dead, my mother is dead,” she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in.…

— Edna O'Brien

“that circular loop was fatal. Patsy giving them their Latin name, herpes zoster, describing how the pain attacked the line of the…

— Edna O'Brien

“evening when I got back from the convent where I worked part-time my clothes were in a bundle on the step, my…

— Edna O'Brien

“I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother’s death…

— Edna O'Brien