Edna OBrien Quotes

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

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.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

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.

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

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

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

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

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.

never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

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

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

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

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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.

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

fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

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.

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

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.