Edna O'Brien Quotes

Quotes about:

• It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

  Edna O'Brien

  Fate, Novelists, Individual

  New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1993.

  57 Copy quote

• History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

  Edna O'Brien

  Bystanders, Fiction, Said

  35 Copy quote

• We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

  Edna O'Brien

  Knowing, Different, Persons

  Edna O'Brien (2002). “The Lonely Girl”, Plume

  36 Copy quote

• When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

  Edna O'Brien

  Character, Tree, Ireland And The Irish

  23 Copy quote

• Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

  Edna O'Brien

  Country, Philosophy, Odds

  31 Copy quote

• Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

  Edna O'Brien

  Beautiful, Flower, Love Is

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Ordinary, Way

  Novelists, Poets and Playwrights (2002).

  20 Copy quote

• what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

  Edna O'Brien

  Fear, Animal, Knowing

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Women, Memorable, Mean

  21 Copy quote

• In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

  Edna O'Brien

  Spring, Real, Winter

  13 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Long, Catholic, Guilt

  15 Copy quote

• ...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

  Edna O'Brien

  Love, People, Like You

  Edna O'Brien (1978). “Seven novels and other short stories”, HarperCollins

  11 Copy quote

• ... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

  Edna O'Brien

  Country, Stars, Flower

  14 Copy quote

• To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

  Edna O'Brien

  Book, Men, Numbers

  15 Copy quote

• Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

  Edna O'Brien

  Sometimes, Whole, Recalls

  Edna O'Brien (1978). “Seven novels and other short stories”, HarperCollins

  12 Copy quote

• it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

  Edna O'Brien

  Death, Dog, Night

  Edna O'Brien (1974). “A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories”

  12 Copy quote

• Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.

  Edna O'Brien

  Wise, Children, Heart

  10 Copy quote

• fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

  Edna O'Brien

  Fear, Live In The Moment, Moments

  5 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Women, Needs, Vote

  Edna O'Brien (2012). “Country Girl”, p.124, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• Promiscuity is the death of love.

  Edna O'Brien

  Promiscuity

  14 Copy quote

• I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.

  Edna O'Brien

  Children, Hair, Hands

  Edna O'Brien (1985). “A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien”, Plume

  8 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Servant, Recollection, I Can

  4 Copy quote

• Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.

  Edna O'Brien

  Punishment, Religion, Stones

  5 Copy quote

• What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

  Edna O'Brien

  Children, Parent, Mets

  7 Copy quote

• There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.

  Edna O'Brien

  Eye, Half, Landscape

  Edna O'Brien (1974). “A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories”

  5 Copy quote

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