Quotes from Edna O'Brien

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable...

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

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

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.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact.

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

The words ran away with me.

Brush those tears from your eyes And try and realize That from now on I'll always be true. I went away But I didn't mean to stay And I will regret it until my dying day.

Oh dark woman With a shawl and ribs I could have served him better With my shanties. But men do love the shimmer And so his ghost Is hacked in half between us The dark me and the dark you.

You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it.