117 Quotes by Edna O'Brien

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

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

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.

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

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

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

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.

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