Quotes from Edna O'Brien

A healer! The beauty of the word a balm. In a mounting astonishment she hears how this man heals with his own blood, pricks his own finger, rubs the blood onto the scab, smears it all over the patient

If I could feel like myself I'd thank God but I don't feel and never will.

I don't know what this great weight of hair is for. Our Lady would hardly approve it," she said as she passed on to the next girl.

they don't talk at all only fight, the mother's will was unclear, Edward got a field up the Commons that William wanted to build on for the remarkable view and there followed dispute and foul play, a stream de-routed, a stream that animals drank from, Edward concluded it was his brother's dirty work

Because I had hankered to go back to America, my husband-to-be agreed that we could go there for a year, while the building work was being done.

laughter filling that end of the ward, overflowing, one bringing a chair for Eleanora, another a cup of coffee, marveling that at long last she has come, they fearing, as her mother feared, that she had gone somewhere as far-flung as Peru, but at least it was only Denmark and for a conference, as they'd been told, to do with her work.

Silage making is more practical than saving hay. When you watch an animal die you think how sad it must be to see a human die. My best days I have seen out.

They have decided to chance it, the healer's farm being only twenty miles off the main road and in her now, gusts of hope, the morbid gloom of earlier brushed away. Something so sacred about this man using his own blood, as did the Savior.

Your brother says he will sever all ties with us unless we do as he asks and sign Rusheen over to him.

You are never out of my mind. I feel the cold more than I used to and this house is big

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.

Quite unselfconsciously she ran her hands along her neck, all along the sides and then to the back to feel the stiffnesses, and though she had not asked me I felt without the words that she wished me to massage her and I did, searching out the knots and the crick, then along the nape, under her swallow, holding the bowl of her head in my hands, entreating her to let go, to let go of all her troubles

Two or three people had gone to Limerick and bought 'The Country Girls.' The parish priest asked them to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of the church.

pouring her troubles out in order for her daughter to know the deep things, the wounds she had to bear:

I wish you'd come for six months. I seem to have got a big burst of energy writing this whereas sometimes I haven't enough strength to hold pen or pencil. You will find that one day as you get older. I worry about you and your traveling to the different places. Nowhere is safe now. My undying love to you.

You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with.

Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted.

remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.

We have a gray stone house with stone slates on the roof and wooden beams inside, and whitewashed bumpety walls and pots for flowers everywhere; the boards creak and he loves me, and there is something about having a child and being in a valley, and being loved, that is more marvelous than anything you or I ever knew about in our flittery days.

Everything hinged on money

Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri. "You have a wife," she had said.

A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a pimp, before a husband is allowed to correct it," he said seething. "You would only tinker with it," she said fearless, though fearing.