Edna OBrien Quotes - Page 2

...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.

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.

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

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

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

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

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

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

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.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

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.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.