Quotes from Edna O'Brien

they never know one another and they're all crazed and wandering.

She knows Con's habits, piling on turf and logs, mad for the big blaze, reckless with firewood like there was no tomorrow.

one thing she does not want to come home to is the after-smell of milk gone sour, a lingering smell that disgusts her and reminds her of sensations she daren't recall.

divide things equally between both children? If anything should happen to her she is appealing to him to honor this final wish. It is the first letter she has written to her husband in over fifty years, an admission that makes her choke back a tear. Fifty years. The golden jubilee that neither remembered. Fields let for grazing. No more the proud neighing thoroughbreds in the fields, the thoroughbreds on which his hopes centered

it would bring good luck. It was a silverfish with gold-threaded scales and when she put it in the palm of my hand, I felt it spring backward as if it was a real fish, something telling in it.

she goes out to the clothesline to hang a few things, his things, her things, and a load of tea cloths.

tears running down her cheeks and her nose, tears from the cold and the prospect of being absent for weeks.

thanking them for coming, and reminding Con to give the dog a bit of something when he gets home late, she forgets altogether to hand him the letter. Holding it after he has left she thinks of the many crucial things left unsaid.

Rusheen was theirs, the old faithful trees keeping watch and enough head of cattle to defray expenses for at least six months or so to come.

he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

Mr. Coaxyoram himself and many a young girl soft on him, but oh, what a gentleman and from a scion of gentlemen. I learned that it was his horse, Red River, that would be played for. He had given it to his friend Jacksie who had lost his all gambling, and the lady he'd been engaged to had jilted him and had not even returned the engagement ring that was his mother's, which was an heirloom.

There was a cry that must have been mine

The convent was a gray stone building with hundreds of small square curtainless windows, like so many eyes spying out on the wet sinful town.

That was Gabriel. I'd wronged him and he paid me back. I'd been told that he was going with another girl when he wasn't, at the time he was sick, unconscious, after an accident in Wisconsin hauling timber, but these two girls, these two friends, deceived me into believing that I was jilted, which I wasn't.

nerves and the toll of the shingles, telling her that the shingles made people depressed, that and other bull, how shingles took a long time to abate, and she telling him that they never abated, that they were always there, worse before rain, barometers of a sort. Patsy, who had done a bit of nursing, coming twice a week to her rescue, bathed the sores, remembered a few things from her nursing days, what ointment to apply

The players were mostly seated, itching to begin, impatient men shuffling the packs of cards, a center lamp on each table, and a hail of welcome as Cornelius entered.

it was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.

After we had drunk the sherry I bought cider for us, and we were a little tipsy as we swayed on the high stools and looked out at the rain as it fell on the fields that shot past the train. But being tipsy we did not see very much and the rain did not touch us.

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. Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing; and Sermons on the Mount. Abandoning women.

that circular loop was fatal. Patsy giving them their Latin name, herpes zoster, describing how the pain attacked the line of the nerves, something Dilly knew beyond the Latin words when she had wept night after night, as they oozed and bled, when nothing, no tablet, no prayer, no interceding, could do anything for her, a punishment so acute that she often felt one half of her body was in mutiny against

Dilly, do not ever forget your own people." My brother came with me to wait for the mail car. He took off his brown scapulars and gave them to me, it being his way of saying goodbye. "In your letters, better not mention politics," he said. He had a secret life from us, he was a Croppy Boy, so many young men were, but dared not speak of it for fear of informers.

Cornelius and Iggy were in the final round and their opponents, who were from the city, displeased and spiteful, not a sound in that room until, at the very zenith, cries of disbelief as it turned out that Cornelius had the knave, the ace, and the king, each of which he threw down with a braggart air and Iggy pooled the winning cards onto his lap. They were the joint winners.

Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence.

The curtain of worldly desire must be ripped in half and I must look into my own soul and overcome the pit of hell. 'I am in hell,' I blurted to her. She almost struck me with her raised withered hand. After that it was banishment. I was sent to a sister house in Ballinasloe, silence and meditation, excused from all manual work, alone with myself, no patients to occupy the welter of my thoughts.