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Edna O'Brien Quotes

Josephine Edna O'Brien, is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Philip Roth described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation".O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls , is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit.

O'Brien received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012. In 2015, she was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. O'Brien lives in London. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. December 1930
Edna O'Brien photo

Works

Country Girl
Country Girl
Edna O'Brien
Girls in Their Married Bliss
Edna O'Brien: 13 quotes2 likes

Famous Edna O'Brien Quotes

“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…”

Edna O'Brien

Source: Girl with Green Eyes

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”

Edna O'Brien

Source: A Fanatic Heart

“… 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.”

Edna O'Brien book Girls in Their Married Bliss

Source: Girls in Their Married Bliss

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

Edna O'Brien

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

Edna O'Brien

“Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.”

Edna O'Brien book Country Girl

Source: Country Girl

Edna O'Brien Quotes

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

Edna O'Brien

Source: In the Forest

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

Edna O'Brien

Source: Saints and Sinners

“It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.”

Edna O'Brien

New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1993

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

Edna O'Brien

Interviewed in Vogue, April 1985

“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.”

Edna O'Brien

Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 119

“The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.”

Edna O'Brien

Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 78

“She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse.”

Edna O'Brien

Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, January 1, 1978
Criticism

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