Quotes from Edna O'Brien

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

To Crystal, hair was the most important thing on earth. She would never get married because you couldn't wear curlers in bed.

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

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

Promiscuity is the death of love.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

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

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

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

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

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

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.

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

I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.