Edna O'Brien

“The words ran away with me.”

— Edna O'Brien

Promiscuity is the death of love.

— Edna O'Brien

August is a wicked month.

— Edna O'Brien

“Everything hinged on money,”

— Edna O'Brien

“moonlight in Mayo” time.”

— Edna O'Brien

“You're a right-looking eejit”

— Edna O'Brien

You have to be lonely to be a writer

— Edna O'Brien

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

— Edna O'Brien

“holidays took the poisons out of everyday life.”

— Edna O'Brien

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

— Edna O'Brien

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

— Edna O'Brien

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

— Edna O'Brien

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

— 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

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

— Edna O'Brien

“Because I had hankered to go back to America, my husband-to-be agreed that we could go there for a year, while the…

— Edna O'Brien

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

— 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

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

— Edna O'Brien

“her husband a grown man, afraid to sleep alone in his own house, he who for many a year struck terror into…

— Edna O'Brien

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you…

— Edna O'Brien

My hand does the work and I dont have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow.…

— Edna O'Brien

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

— Edna O'Brien

“Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother…

— Edna O'Brien

“A healer! The beauty of the word a balm. In a mounting astonishment she hears how this man heals with his own…

— Edna O'Brien

“Solveig was higher up than me. She had a white apron. She was the cook. Sieving and singing hymns that her pastor…

— 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…

— Edna O'Brien

“A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a…

— 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

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

“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

“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

There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise…

— Edna O'Brien

“Is that Rococo, Pascal?” Chrissie said as she stood by the missus’s desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. “Oh,…

— Edna O'Brien

“Wakened one morning in some dive to know the game was up. Nausea, the shivers, the disease that bums, stevedores, poets, and…

— 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

“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

“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