Edna O'Brien Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

  Edna O'Brien

  Tuning, Want, Forks

  4 Copy quote

• You have to be lonely to be a writer

  Edna O'Brien

  Lonely

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Punishment, Religion, Stones

  9 Copy quote

• Promiscuity is the death of love.

  Edna O'Brien

  Promiscuity

  20 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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 seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

  Edna O'Brien

  Kissing, Cities, Vastness

  Edna O'Brien (2011). “Saints and Sinners”, p.128, Faber & Faber

  8 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

  19 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”

  16 Copy quote

• I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

  Edna O'Brien

  Temptation, Chastity

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Mother, Jesus, Hate

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

  4 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”

  9 Copy quote

• For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

  Edna O'Brien

  Writing, Thieves, Littles

  8 Copy quote

• 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 to recapture that heightened awareness.

  Edna O'Brien

  Childhood, Fatherhood, Trying

  13 Copy quote

• We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

  Edna O'Brien

  9 Copy quote

• IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

  Edna O'Brien

  School, Night, Men

  Edna O'Brien (2007). “The Light of Evening”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 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

  11 Copy quote

• I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.

  Edna O'Brien

  Sleep, Men, Dating

  11 Copy quote

• When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

  Edna O'Brien

  Falling In Love, Spring, Differences

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Cutting, People, Kind

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

  6 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Writing, Mean, Disturbed

  4 Copy quote

• literature is the last banquet between minds.

  Edna O'Brien

  Mind, Literature, Lasts

  7 Copy quote

• Writing is like carrying a fetus.

  Edna O'Brien

  Writing, Fetus

  24 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

  13 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

  8 Copy quote

• Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

  Edna O'Brien

  Talking, Two, Evening

  4 Copy quote

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