117 Quotes by Edna O'Brien

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.

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.

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

You’re a right-looking eejit.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?'