117 Quotes by Edna O'Brien

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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

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