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Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien Books

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Country Girl

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In the Forest

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Night

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The Lonely Girl

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“Useless to say that I hadn't thought of him when I was doing it. Useless to say that I always thought your acquaintanceship with one person had nothing to do with another. Or to say all the things that went on in my head, the longings, for songs, cigarettes, dark bars, telegrams, cacti, combs in your hair, the circus, nights out, life. He wouldn't understand.”

Longing
Book:The Country Girls Trilogy & Epilogue [The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, Girls in their married bliss].
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“The good and the bad of him alternated in my thoughts, as I remembered first his scowling expression and his unyielding nature and then his tenderness - he brought me toast to bed once and put lanolin on a welt of mine, and got three pillows so that I could be propped up to read. For a while I welcomed the fact that one day I would be old and dried, and no man would torment my heart.”

PeaceRelationshipsHeartache
Book:The Country Girls Trilogy & Epilogue [The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, Girls in their married bliss].
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“There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.”

IfsEyeNextHalfSeeingLatePraiseExcuseLandscapeLoved OnesDefectsPenniesCelestialAppointmentsInvoke
Book:A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories
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“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.”

MenFirstsBookEndsMatterWould BeNumbersCenturyBrokenLettersTwentiesPrivilegeEnormousAdmireObsessedTwentieth CenturyJoyceUlyssesBroken ManTransubstantiation
Author: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.”

IfsWayFeelsChildrenDifferentHandsFeltRoomsHairFingersSurfaceDifferent WaysTouchedPalmsStrands
Book:A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien
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