Edna O'Brien Quotes

43 quotes in 633 categories

• Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
• Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.
• In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.
• I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying…
• Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.
• I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.
• Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted…
• Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the…
• After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.
• You have to be lonely to be a writer
• I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time....
• In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and…
• Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
• I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.
• My hand does the work and I dont have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. Its like a…
• Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.
• She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There…
• The other me, who did not mean to drown herself, went under the sea and remained there for a long time. Eventually she surfaced near…
• Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake…
• Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

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