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

Categorized in : Nurse Calling Training

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

individual fate novelists

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

Edna O'Brien

bystanders said fiction

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

different knowing persons

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

odds philosophy country

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

Edna O'Brien

ireland-and-the-irish tree character

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

flower love-is beautiful

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

ordinary people way

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

knowing fear animal

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

Edna O'Brien

real winter spring

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

Edna O'Brien

women memorable mean

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

Edna O'Brien

numbers men book

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

Edna O'Brien

catholic guilt long

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

Edna O'Brien

stars flower country

...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

like-you love people

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

Edna O'Brien

recalls whole sometimes

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

dog night death

fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

Edna O'Brien

moments fear live-in-the-moment

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

hair children hands

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

Edna O'Brien

women vote needs

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.

Edna O'Brien

wise heart children