Edna O'Brien

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.

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

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

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

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

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

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

...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.

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.

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

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.

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