Edna O'Brien Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.
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If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
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Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
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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.
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Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
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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?
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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.
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I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.
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It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.
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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.
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I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.
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We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.
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Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.
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Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.
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The other me, who did not mean to drown herself, went under the sea and remained there for a long time. Eventually she surfaced near Japan and people gave her gifts but she had been so long under the sea she did not recognize what they were. She is a sly one. Mostly at night we commune. Night. Harbinger of dream and nightmare and bearer of omens which defy the music of words. In the morning the fear of her going is very real and very alarming. It can make one tremble. Not that she cares. She is the muse. I am the messenger.
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Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.
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Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.
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The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
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... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?
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What matters is the imaginative truth.
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Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
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In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
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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.
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I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
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I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.
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what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.
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She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
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I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.
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