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What makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly. -- Edna O'brien
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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
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Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all - the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness. -- Edna O'brien
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Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be. -- Edna O'brien
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A stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again. -- Edna O'brien
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It is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night. -- Edna O'brien
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I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant. -- Edna O'brien
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I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man. -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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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
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lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other's names. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice, all the size of her, boasting about the presents their husbands gave them for their birthdays -- Edna O'brien
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The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit -- Edna O'brien
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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
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You're a right-looking eejit -- Edna O'brien
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Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it. -- Edna O'brien
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Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth. -- Edna O'brien
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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
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My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts. -- Edna O'brien
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Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous. -- Edna O'brien
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I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles. -- Edna O'brien
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I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation. -- Edna O'brien
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You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it. -- Edna O'brien
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We have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey? -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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But we want young men. Romance. Love and things, I said, despondently. -- Edna O'brien
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her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both. -- Edna O'brien
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Promiscuity is the death of love. -- Edna O'brien
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There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games. -- Edna O'brien
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It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it. -- Edna O'brien
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After we had drunk the sherry I bought cider for us, and we were a little tipsy as we swayed on the high stools and looked out at the rain as it fell on the fields that shot past the train. But being tipsy we did not see very much and the rain did not touch us. -- Edna O'brien
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Fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment. -- Edna O'brien
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The place was stifling. Suddenly it occurred to her that a trace of him still lurked in her, minute and spectral, that effluvial stain that would be her stigmata forever. It was then that she resolved to ask for an appointment to see him, as things had to be settled between them. -- Edna O'brien
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Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget -- Edna O'brien
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If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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Shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love. -- Edna O'brien
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Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch. -- Edna O'brien
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suddenly the window flew open, swung back and forth on its hinges, as if something was about to come in, and she waited in dread for what that something might be. -- Edna O'brien
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Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment. -- Edna O'brien
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She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere. -- Edna O'brien
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Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk," she said. "It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can't truly be sociable. -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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Everything hinged on money, -- Edna O'brien
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remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child. -- Edna O'brien
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a mammy's boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down. -- Edna O'brien
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Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic. -- Edna O'brien
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The players were mostly seated, itching to begin, impatient men shuffling the packs of cards, a center lamp on each table, and a hail of welcome as Cornelius entered. -- Edna O'brien
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Solveig was higher up than me. She had a white apron. She was the cook. Sieving and singing hymns that her pastor in Sweden had taught her. Her eyes were the beautiful twinkling blue of a sleeping doll. -- Edna O'brien
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You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with. -- Edna O'brien
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In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?' -- Edna O'brien
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Only fools think that men and women love differently. Fools and pedagogues. I tell you, the love of men for women is just as heartbreaking, just as muddled, just as bewildering, and in the end, just as unfinished. -- Edna O'brien
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Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons. -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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Brush those tears from your eyes
And try and realize
That from now on
I'll always be true.
I went away
But I didn't mean to stay
And I will regret it until my dying day. -- Edna O'brien
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In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature. -- Edna O'brien
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I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women. -- Edna O'brien
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Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things. -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a pimp, before a husband is allowed to correct it," he said seething. "You would only tinker with it," she said fearless, though fearing. -- Edna O'brien
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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
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What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often. -- Edna O'brien
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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. -- Edna O'brien
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In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. -- Edna O'brien
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Jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal. -- Edna O'brien
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Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something. -- Edna O'brien
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Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for. -- Edna O'brien
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It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless. -- Edna O'brien
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It's not the vote women need, we should be armed. -- Edna O'brien
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After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart. -- Edna O'brien
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The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed. -- Edna O'brien
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We don't know others. They are an enigma. We can't know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth. -- Edna O'brien
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She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company, -- Edna O'brien
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It was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed. -- Edna O'brien
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I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be. -- Edna O'brien
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Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty. -- Edna O'brien
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most prized of all, her secretaire, a Napoleon III desk, full of nooks and crannies and pigeonholes, -- Edna O'brien
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I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt. -- Edna O'brien
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I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life. -- Edna O'brien
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I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women. -- Edna O'brien
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Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. -- Edna O'brien
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I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork. -- Edna O'brien
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The words ran away with me. -- Edna O'brien
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On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, -- Edna O'brien
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August is a wicked month. -- Edna O'brien
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holidays took the poisons out of everyday life. -- Edna O'brien
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Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. -- Edna O'brien
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When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious. -- Edna O'brien
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Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart. -- Edna O'brien
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Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted. -- Edna O'brien
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I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness. -- Edna O'brien
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I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love. -- Edna O'brien
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Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost. -- Edna O'brien
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Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down. -- Edna O'brien
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Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me. -- Edna O'brien
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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
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Kindness. The most unkind thing of all. -- Edna O'brien
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Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life. -- Edna O'brien
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In the bodily garden the apple lurks. -- Edna O'brien
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You have to be lonely to be a writer -- Edna O'brien
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So many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son. -- Edna O'brien
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I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time ... -- Edna O'brien
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motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries. -- Edna O'brien
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History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. -- Edna O'brien
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Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye. -- Edna O'brien
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Writers are always anxious, always on the run
from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world. -- Edna O'brien
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Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything. -- Edna O'brien
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We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love. -- Edna O'brien
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Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up. -- Edna O'brien
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When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it. -- Edna O'brien
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When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season ... -- Edna O'brien
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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
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Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri. "You have a wife," she had said. -- Edna O'brien
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I don't call it hate . . . I call it an awakening . . . you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife, and instead I get a schemer, plotting to pursue her own rotten ambition under the rubric of poetry . . . what a mockery, what a marriage. -- Edna O'brien
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That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open. -- Edna O'brien
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A country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring. -- Edna O'brien
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Writing is like carrying a fetus. -- Edna O'brien
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A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world. "You kilt it." "She kilt it." "I had no milk for it," she answered back. -- Edna O'brien
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For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert. -- Edna O'brien
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What matters is the imaginative truth. -- Edna O'brien
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Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts. -- Edna O'brien
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We have s<>ong>oong> many v<>ong>oong>ices in us, h<>ong>oong>w d<>ong>oong> we kn<>ong>oong>w which <>ong>oong>nes t<>ong>oong> <>ong>oong>bey? -- Edna O'brien