Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brienis an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Philip Roth has described her "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson has cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation."...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 December 1932
CountryIreland
goodbye money-talks
Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.
book home men
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.
love-is two giving
She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
running responsibility world
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
tuning forks tense
I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time....
lasts lovers back-and-forth
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?
what-matters matter imaginative
What matters is the imaginative truth.
writing fetus
Writing is like carrying a fetus.
faces firsts madness
It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.
self cells people
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.
teeth sin holy
If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
moments inadequate
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
school night men
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.
love people like-you
...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.