Edna O'Brien

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

“Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.”

“Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.”

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

“The words ran away with me.”

“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.”

“Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“الجسد يحوي الكثير من قصص الحياة تماما مثل المخ.”

“Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”

“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.”

“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”

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

“We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable...”

“...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.”

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”

“The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.”

“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. ”

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”

“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.”