52 quotes found
Writer · Irish · 1930–2024
Irish writer (1930–2024)
“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
“In a way winter is the real spring the time when the inner things happen the resurge of nature.”
“When something has been perfect there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.”
“I waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come ...”
“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...”
“The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.”
“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.”
“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.”
“[On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us...”
“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.”
“Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.”
“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”
“It is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)”
“Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)”
“I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them. (1995)”
“[A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them. (1995)”
“I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn.”
“Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination.”
“To make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find ...”
“County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. (Is it always familiar territory?) O'BRIEN: Yes and no. Wit...”
