Top 70 Edna O'Brien Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “August is a wicked month.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

4. “In a way Winter is the real Spring – the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.”

— Edna O'Brien

5. “History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.”

— Edna O'Brien

6. “Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”

— Edna O'Brien

7. “Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.”

— Edna O'Brien

8. “I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.”

— Edna O'Brien

9. “I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.”

— Edna O'Brien

10. “Promiscuity is the death of love.”

— Edna O'Brien

11. “What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.”

— Edna O'Brien

12. “Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

15. “Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.”

— Edna O'Brien

16. “You’re a right-looking eejit.”

— Edna O'Brien

17. “For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it’s a little covert.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

19. “What matters is the imaginative truth.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

21. “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

22. “Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.”

— Edna O'Brien

23. “We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.”

— Edna O'Brien

24. “Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.”

— Edna O'Brien

25. “I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.”

— Edna O'Brien

26. “I’m a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time...”

— Edna O'Brien

27. “Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

30. “I always want to be in love, always. It’s like being a tuning fork.”

— Edna O'Brien

31. “In the first dusk he walks back. Flowers and fallen confetti, from a wedding two days earlier, lie trodden on the wet grass and he knows in his heart that he is sure who he man was, but that nobody in the whole world, not even Tommy, not even Ivan, would believe him.”

— Edna O'Brien

32. “It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.”

— Edna O'Brien

33. “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

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

— Edna O'Brien

35. “I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

37. “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.”

— Edna O'Brien

38. “Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk,” she said. “It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can’t truly be sociable.”

— Edna O'Brien

39. “My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.”

— Edna O'Brien

40. “Their eyes meet and part, each staring into the forlorn space, a shaft of disappointment, he because he is unable to help her and she because she is thrown back into her own quagmire of uncertainty.”

— Edna O'Brien

41. “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

42. “When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.”

— Edna O'Brien

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

— Edna O'Brien

44. “Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for.”

— Edna O'Brien

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Edna O'Brien

47. “I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.”

— Edna O'Brien

48. “You would not believe how many words there are for ‘home’ and what savage music there can be wrung from it.”

— Edna O'Brien

49. “Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.”

— Edna O'Brien

50. “Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all – the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness.”

— Edna O'Brien