Edna O'Brien
When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.Collection: Character
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.Collection: Bystanders
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.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Fate
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Country
... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?Collection: Voice
Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.Collection: Sometimes
In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: People
Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.Collection: Goodbye
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.Collection: Fear
Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.Collection: Wise
When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.Collection: Perfection
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.Collection: Moments
I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.Collection: Temptation
She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.Collection: Love Is
Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.Collection: Punishment
... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Death
Promiscuity is the death of love.Collection: Promiscuity
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.Collection: Book
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.Collection: Light
There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.Collection: Real
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.Collection: Running
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.Collection: Writing
Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Mother
Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.Collection: Kindness
Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Heart
Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.Collection: Talking
August is a wicked month.Collection: August
After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.Collection: Heart
Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.Collection: Horse
shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.Collection: Shadow
I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.Collection: Tuning
There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.Collection: Book
jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.Collection: Jealousy
What matters is the imaginative truth.Collection: What Matters
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.Collection: Dream
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 dam in the brain that bursts.Collection: Thinking
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 to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like 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.Collection: Beautiful
I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.Collection: Mistake
Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.Collection: People
Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.Collection: Grew
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.Collection: Nurse
It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.Collection: Faces
When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.Collection: Falling In Love
I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.Collection: Love Is