Edna O'Brien
Novelist
1932-12-15
Quotes by Edna O'Brien
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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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My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don't know who my brother. In war I don't know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.
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That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
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It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
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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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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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It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
Read quote -
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
Read quote -
My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don't know who my brother. In war I don't know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.
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That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Read quote -
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Read quote -
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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Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
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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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The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
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Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
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People liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love, too, only more so.
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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.
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