Edna O'Brien Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Punishment, Religion, Stones

  9 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Tuning, Want, Forks

  4 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

• Promiscuity is the death of love.

  Edna O'Brien

  Promiscuity

  20 Copy quote

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Temptation, Chastity

  4 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

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Writing, Mean, Disturbed

  4 Copy quote

• You have to be lonely to be a writer

  Edna O'Brien

  Lonely

  4 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

• 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

• 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 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

• I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

  Edna O'Brien

  Trust, Men, Competition

  9 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

• What matters is the imaginative truth.

  Edna O'Brien

  What Matters, Matter, Imaginative

  4 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

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

  Edna O'Brien

  Death, Way, Birth

  Edna O'Brien (2013). “The Love Object: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien”, p.138, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

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