Quotes from Edna O'Brien

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.

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.

That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could.

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

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

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

Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.

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.

wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company

so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.

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 with truth.

Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.

FOR THREE NIGHTS in a row, Dilly has dreamed of Gabriel, a look of yearning on his face, the clothes hanging off him, making no attempt to come to her and yet making his presence felt, standing on an empty road, like he was waiting. Three nights in a row. "It must mean that he's trying to reach you," Sister says. "It doesn't," Dilly answers

The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit

In the bodily garden the apple lurks.

I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try

He never studied, not a paper, not a textbook . . . the books he reads are the people that come to him

Their eyes meet and part, each staring into the forlorn space, a shaft of disappointment, he because he is unable to help her and she because she is thrown back into her own quagmire of uncertainty.

moonlight in Mayo" time.

Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things.

I barely eat cake now. The one I'm sending you, make a hole on the top with a knitting needle and pour a glass of whiskey into it to keep it moist.

She had always thought that people who had once loved one another kept the faintest trace of it in their being, but not him. He was free of her. Marked of course, but free in a way that she was not. She was still joined by fear, by sexual necessity, by what she knew as love.

In the first dusk he walks back. Flowers and fallen confetti, from a wedding two days earlier, lie trodden on the wet grass and he knows in his heart that he is sure who he man was, but that nobody in the whole world, not even Tommy, not even Ivan, would believe him.