Home > Author > Edna O'Brien
21 " Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye. "
― Edna O'Brien , Country Girl
22 " 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. "
23 " It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it. "
24 " 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. "
― Edna O'Brien
25 " 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. "
― Edna O'Brien , The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue
26 " After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart. "
27 " I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant. "
28 " Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be. "
29 " 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. "
30 " Brush those tears from your eyesAnd try and realizeThat from now onI'll always be true.I went awayBut I didn't mean to stayAnd I will regret it until my dying day. "
31 " الجسد يحوي الكثير من قصص الحياة تماما مثل المخ. "
32 " 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. "
― Edna O'Brien , Saints and Sinners: Stories
33 " Oh dark woman With a shawl and ribsI could have served him betterWith my shanties.But men do love the shimmerAnd so his ghostIs hacked in half between usThe dark me and the dark you. "
34 " You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it. "
― Edna O'Brien , The Little Red Chairs
35 " In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things "
36 " We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth. "
37 " Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything. "
38 " I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things." short story "Sister Imelda "
― Edna O'Brien , Returning: A Collection of Tales
39 " I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women. "
40 " I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be. "
― Edna O'Brien , House of Splendid Isolation