Edna OBrien Quotes - Page 3

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

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.

August is a wicked month.

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

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

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?

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

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

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

She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere.

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.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

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.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

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

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

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

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

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

My hand does the work and I dont have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. Its like a dam in the brain that bursts.

The other me, who did not mean to drown herself, went under the sea and remained there for a long time. Eventually she surfaced near Japan and people gave her gifts but she had been so long under the sea she did not recognize what they were. She is a sly one. Mostly at night we commune. Night. Harbinger of dream and nightmare and bearer of omens which defy the music of words. In the morning the fear of her going is very real and very alarming. It can make one tremble. Not that she cares. She is the muse. I am the messenger.

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