EDNA O'BRIEN

I am far from those I am with, and far from those I have left.

EDNA O'BRIEN
Girls in Their Wedded Bliss

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. Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing; and sermons-on-the-mount. Abandoning women. I thought of all the women who had it, and didn't even know when the big moment was, and others saying their rosary with the beads held over the side of the bed, and others saying, “Stop, stop, you dirty old dog,” and others yelling desperately to be jacked right up to their middles, and it often leading to nothing, and them getting up out of bed and riding a poor door knob and kissing the wooden face of a door and urging with foul language, then crying, wiping the knob, and it all adding up to nothing either.

EDNA O'BRIEN
The Light of Evening

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
Interview with Philip Roth, The New York Times (1984)

[Roth: Are you surprised that you survived the isolated farm and the violent father and the provincial convent without having lost the freedom of mind to be able to write?]

I am surprised by my own sturdiness - yes; but I do not think that I am unscarred. Such things as driving a car or swimming are quite beyond me. In a lot of ways I feel a cripple. The body was as sacred as a tabernacle and everything a potential occasion of sin. It is funny now, but not that funny - the body contains the life story just as much as the brain. I console myself by thinking that if one part is destroyed another flourishes.