Edna O'Brien

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

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

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.
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

The words ran away with me.
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

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...
― Edna O'Brien, Girl With Green Eyes

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
― Edna O'Brien