Quotes from Edna O'Brien

But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something . . .

Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for.

A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world. "You kilt it." "She kilt it." "I had no milk for it," she answered back.

It was no longer her sleeping room, it was our sleeping room now. We made friends the night it thundered, big claps of it and forked lightning flared then sizzled inside the room, she cowering under my bed, terrified that Eric Eric, the man with the clapper who broke up the big ships in the harbor in Malmo, was coming for her.

Only fools think that men and women love differently. Fools and pedagogues. I tell you, the love of men for women is just as heartbreaking, just as muddled, just as bewildering, and in the end, just as unfinished.

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.

The day I brought my suicide dream he got quite conversant. The dream was thus. I had gone to Holland to avail myself of their suicide hospitality. It was a sort of garage, the light from the fluorescent tubes ghastly bright. We were told to sit for a given time. The waiting was perhaps to allow the sufferers to make peace with themselves or maybe write a last letter to kith and kin. Not once did we acknowledge one another.

Ice was precious.

like a bell at the interval in the theater, and we all stood up and formed an orderly line to go in and meet our end. At the very last minute I panicked. I realized that my children would see it as an everlasting betrayal and so I went to an attendant and asked to be excused, to be allowed to turn back, except that it was too late.

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

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

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.

The punch was getting to them, their faces redder and small tiffs between couples

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.

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.

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.

I had clung to the fable of the Steppenwolf, believing that his redemption would also become mine.

Oh Father, oh Mother, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

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.

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.

Mr Berry: We are not childhood sweethearts, we are not in the first flush of youth, we are not Romeo and Juliet. Mrs Berry: No ... we are the warring what's-their-names families of Romeo and Juliet.

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.

her husband a grown man, afraid to sleep alone in his own house, he who for many a year struck terror into her and Eleanora.

The flutter of the leaves brought on your trance. Hundreds of thousands of sycamore leaves all obeying the same wind, their wide green palms opening then tightening, letting in and keeping out the light, changing the prospect from outdoor to indoor, forever altering. It was the most lonesome hour just before dusk with all the colors going, all the streamers , the pinks and reds, and violets and indigos and blues, the lovely laneways of vanquishing light.