“Wakened one morning in some dive to know the game was up. Nausea, the shivers, the disease that bums, stevedores, poets, and the city elders all fell foul to. The syph. Had to be burned out of him. Oh man,… — Edna O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I don’t call it hate . . . I call it an awakening . . . you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife, and instead I get a schemer, plotting to pursue her own rotten ambition under the rubric of poetry… — 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