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
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.
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.
men competition built
I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.
sleep men dating
I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.
book men numbers
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.
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.
lonely
You have to be lonely to be a writer
nurse training calling
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.
dream morning real
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.
beautiful mother lonely
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.
horse mushrooms ponies
Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.
moments inadequate
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
teeth sin holy
If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
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.