Edna OBrien quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Edna OBrien

Top Edna OBrien Quotes

Browse top 58 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Edna OBrien.

Favorite Edna OBrien Quotes

1. "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

2. "...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

3. "When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious." ~ Edna O'Brien

4. "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, the mercury that cured also took away, a descent into blindness. "I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin and defiled my horn in the dust." ~ Edna O'Brien

5. "never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty." ~ Edna O'Brien

6. "But we want young men. Romance. Love and things," I said, despondently." ~ Edna O'Brien

7. "is the unseen guest at every table, the silent listener to every conversation"—her mother thereby inferring that she too would be the unseen guest and the silent listener to every conversation." ~ Edna O'Brien

8. "Not easy for me making time to write I have a man very hard on socks and workmen need three meals a day with jugs of tea and bread in between. My darling you will always have a message from me if only a postcard when I cannot make time for a letter. I would know if you were dead. Perhaps you are on your way here. Be sure to bring a candle a Christmas candle we need a bit of light to shed on things." ~ Edna O'Brien

9. "She had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask, a thousand hers revolting within herself and toward him. Yet coexisting with her flounder was the hope that one evening he would call her into his study and they would talk openly, talk of the things that had kept them apart and from their candor there would be born a real love, a lasting love that they had both envisaged. The news of her pregnancy elated him." ~ Edna O'Brien

10. "So many misunderstandings. I was going across to you you were coming across to me but I was motioned back told to sit down and wait and that you would be with me seven years from this day. If you would get yourself photographed front face and silhouette and send it to me I will send postal order by return. Make sure the photographer catches the spill of your hair and your trim black beard." ~ Edna O'Brien

11. "she sees her life pass before her in rapid succession, like clouds, different shapes and different colors, merging, passing into one another, the story of her life being pulled out of her, like the pages pulled from a book." ~ Edna O'Brien

12. "the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty." ~ Edna O'Brien

13. "I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt." ~ Edna O'Brien

14. "Writing is like carrying a fetus." ~ Edna O'Brien

15. "That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open." ~ Edna O'Brien

16. "Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it." ~ Edna O'Brien

17. "I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women." ~ Edna O'Brien

18. "Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul." ~ Edna O'Brien

19. "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

20. "The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed." ~ Edna O'Brien

21. "If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin" ~ Edna O'Brien

22. "Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read." ~ Edna O'Brien

23. "Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye." ~ Edna O'Brien

24. "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

25. "I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant." ~ Edna O'Brien

26. "The words ran away with me." ~ Edna O'Brien

27. "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 for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact." ~ Edna O'Brien

28. "Brush those tears from your eyesAnd try and realizeThat from now onI'll always be true.I went awayBut I didn't mean to stayAnd I will regret it until my dying day." ~ Edna O'Brien

29. "Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be." ~ Edna O'Brien

30. "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 Japan and people gave her gifts but she had been so long under the sea she did not recognize what they were. She is a sly one. Mostly at night we commune. Night. Harbinger of dream and nightmare and bearer of omens which defy the music of words. In the morning the fear of her going is very real and very alarming. It can make one tremble. Not that she cares. She is the muse. I am the messenger." ~ Edna O'Brien

31. "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

32. "After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart." ~ Edna O'Brien

33. "Oh dark woman With a shawl and ribsI could have served him betterWith my shanties.But men do love the shimmerAnd so his ghostIs hacked in half between usThe dark me and the dark you." ~ Edna O'Brien

34. "I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women." ~ Edna O'Brien

35. "Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life." ~ Edna O'Brien

36. "I could feel she was angry with me because of my gawkiness, because of my accent and my oilskin bag, bound with twine. She talked to herself, mumbled, as the train rumbled along. Then all of a sudden her mood changed and she kissed me and hugged me and said my mother and her mother were first cousins and that meant that she and I were second cousins and would be buddies." ~ Edna O'Brien

37. "I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son." ~ Edna O'Brien

38. "Ice was precious." ~ Edna O'Brien

39. "Is that Rococo, Pascal?" Chrissie said as she stood by the missus's desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. "Oh, don't touch there or you'll be shot," Pascal said, because it was where the missus kept her souvenirs, love letters from men before him, locks of hair, dried shamrock, and the words of songs that she rehearsed for her parties. Her family was musical," ~ Edna O'Brien

40. "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 were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere." ~ Edna O'Brien

41. "Chrissie tried all the chairs, the armchairs, the high chairs, the spindle-back chairs, "Is that apple wood, is that tulip wood, is that rosewood, Pascal?" People pitying her with her limp, in a yellow summery dress with a wide green sash as if she was entering a dance competition. Remarking on the holly to be so rich with berries, she said a good crop of berries always meant an addition to the family," ~ Edna O'Brien

42. "Jenny is super duper" was the answer back. Jenny knew how to humor the missus, calling her a slip of a girl and drawing attention to every feature of her attire, down to the velvet shoes, that would you believe it were called mules, mules with a field of flowers and medallions on them, like a carpet." ~ Edna O'Brien

43. "The punch was getting to them, their faces redder and small tiffs between couples," ~ Edna O'Brien

44. "four of us slept in the one bed, two at the bottom and two at the top. All of us tossed and turned and raved in our sleep." ~ Edna O'Brien

45. "evening when I got back from the convent where I worked part-time my clothes were in a bundle on the step, my name in big print on a label on top. At first I thought it was a joke, but when I examined it I saw that every stitch I owned was in there, my pleated skirt, my good shoes, laddered stockings, my brush and comb, my prayer book, everything." ~ Edna O'Brien

46. "wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up." ~ Edna O'Brien

47. "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

48. "She knows Con's habits, piling on turf and logs, mad for the big blaze, reckless with firewood like there was no tomorrow." ~ Edna O'Brien

49. "Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment." ~ Edna O'Brien

50. "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

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We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

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