Quotes from Edna O'Brien

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

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.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

In a way winter is the real spring the time when the inner things happen the resurge of nature.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things

We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth.

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. short story Sister Imelda

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be.

But we want young men. Romance. Love and things, I said, despondently.

Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something.

Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all - the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness.

It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.

You're a right-looking eejit

I had not realized how far gone she was and how much she dreaded the homecoming, the ghost. We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth.

Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk," she said. "It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can't truly be sociable.

On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation

a stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.

My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don't know who my brother. In war I don't know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.

The wall was a symbol of protests, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations.