Edna O'Brien

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

The words ran away with me.

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don__ know who my brother. In war I don__ 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.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

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.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

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

In a way winter is the real spring the time when the inner things happen the resurge of nature.

If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

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.