Edna O'Brien

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

— Edna O'Brien

I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

— Edna O'Brien

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

— Edna O'Brien

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

— Edna O'Brien

“her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both.”

— Edna O'Brien

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time…

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

“pouring her troubles out in order for her daughter to know the deep things, the wounds she had to bear:”

— Edna O'Brien

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write…

— Edna O'Brien

“tears running down her cheeks and her nose, tears from the cold and the prospect of being absent for weeks.”

— Edna O'Brien

“the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature’s fault that…

— Edna O'Brien

never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human…

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

“Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.”

— Edna O'Brien

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and…

— Edna O'Brien

“Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think…

— Edna O'Brien

“one thing she does not want to come home to is the after-smell of milk gone sour, a lingering smell that disgusts…

— Edna O'Brien

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under…

— Edna O'Brien

“I don’t call it hate . . . I call it an awakening . . . you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife,…

— Edna O'Brien

“Jenny is super duper” was the answer back. Jenny knew how to humor the missus, calling her a slip of a girl…

— Edna O'Brien

“it would bring good luck. It was a silverfish with gold-threaded scales and when she put it in the palm of my…

— Edna O'Brien

“lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other’s…

— Edna O'Brien

“She had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask, a thousand hers revolting within herself and toward him. Yet…

— Edna O'Brien

“I could feel she was angry with me because of my gawkiness, because of my accent and my oilskin bag, bound with…

— Edna O'Brien

“Quite unselfconsciously she ran her hands along her neck, all along the sides and then to the back to feel the stiffnesses,…

— Edna O'Brien

“I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending,…

— Edna O'Brien

“It was no longer her sleeping room, it was our sleeping room now. We made friends the night it thundered, big claps…

— Edna O'Brien

“Cornelius and Iggy were in the final round and their opponents, who were from the city, displeased and spiteful, not a sound…

— Edna O'Brien

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are…

— Edna O'Brien

The other me, who did not mean to drown herself, went under the sea and remained there for a long time. Eventually…

— Edna O'Brien

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

— Edna O'Brien

What matters is the imaginative truth.

— Edna O'Brien

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

— Edna O'Brien

“Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something.”

— Edna O'Brien

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien