Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by Edna O'Brien - Page 2

What matters is the imaginative truth.

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.

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.

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

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.

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.

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

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.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

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

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

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.

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

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

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

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

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

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.