That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Interpretation
Writing often emerges from personal struggles and deep emotional pain.
Edna O'Brien emphasizes that the process of writing is deeply intertwined with human suffering and emotional turmoil. It suggests that profound experiences, especially those that are painful or challenging, can lead to the creation of art, as writers channel their afflictions into their work, revealing the intricate relationship between personal hardship and creativity.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of art, one might reference this quote to highlight how personal struggles can inspire great creativity.
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.
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 used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.
Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
To get even realer with you for a second, as a black actor, as a performer of color, I don't know how many more roles like Aaron Burr are gonna come along for me.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
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