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Top 70 Edna O'Brien Quotes (2025 Update)
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Edna O'Brien Quote: “Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.”

51. “Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “There was always a real reason for everything – why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.”

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

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “The wall was a symbol of protests, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations.”

53. “The wall was a symbol of protests, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”

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

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.”

55. “Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.”

56. “All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Writing is like carrying a fetus.”

57. “Writing is like carrying a fetus.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.”

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

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “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.”

59. “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.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Ideally I’d like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.”

60. “Ideally I’d like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “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.”

61. “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.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “I’m an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.”

62. “I’m an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.”

63. “I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin.”

64. “If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.”

65. “Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.”

66. “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “She had always thought that people who had once loved one another kept the faintest trace of it in their being, but not him. He was free of her. Marked of course, but free in a way that she was not. She was still joined by fear, by sexual necessity, by what she knew as love.”

67. “She had always thought that people who had once loved one another kept the faintest trace of it in their being, but not him. He was free of her. Marked of course, but free in a way that she was not. She was still joined by fear, by sexual necessity, by what she knew as love.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “I had not realized how far gone she was and how much she dreaded the homecoming, the ghost. 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.”

68. “I had not realized how far gone she was and how much she dreaded the homecoming, the ghost. 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

Edna O'Brien Quote: “I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.”

69. “I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.”

70. “Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “You have to be lonely to be a writer.”

71. “You have to be lonely to be a writer.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit.”

72. “The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.”

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

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?”

74. “In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could.”

75. “That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.”

76. “Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.”

— Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Quote: “He probably knew that any man she took up with now would only pay in pain for what had happened between her and Eugene; the brutal logic of wronged lovers taking their revenge on innocents and outsiders.”

77. “He probably knew that any man she took up with now would only pay in pain for what had happened between her and Eugene; the brutal logic of wronged lovers taking their revenge on innocents and outsiders.”

— Edna O'Brien

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