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 Copy Share Image
It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it. — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring. — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with… — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“A healer! The beauty of the word a balm. In a mounting astonishment she hears how this man heals with his own blood, pricks… — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“If I could feel like myself I’d thank God but I don’t feel and never will.” — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too,… — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“tears running down her cheeks and her nose, tears from the cold and the prospect of being absent for weeks.” — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“laughter filling that end of the ward, overflowing, one bringing a chair for Eleanora, another a cup of coffee, marveling that at long last… — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.” — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
