The Light of Evening Quotes

“Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“I barely eat cake now. The one I’m sending you, make a hole on the top with a knitting needle and pour a glass of whiskey into it to keep it moist.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“In the bodily garden the apple lurks.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“FOR THREE NIGHTS in a row, Dilly has dreamed of Gabriel, a look of yearning on his face, the clothes hanging off him, making no attempt to come to her and yet making his presence felt, standing on an empty road, like he was waiting. Three nights in a row. “It must mean that he’s trying to reach you,” Sister says. “It doesn’t,” Dilly answers”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company,”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother’s death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.”
― 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, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation,”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“she sees her life pass before her in rapid succession, like clouds, different shapes and different colors, merging, passing into one another, the story of her life being pulled out of her, like the pages pulled from a book.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“moonlight in Mayo” time.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“Their eyes meet and part, each staring into the forlorn space, a shaft of disappointment, he because he is unable to help her and she because she is thrown back into her own quagmire of uncertainty.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“He never studied, not a paper, not a textbook . . . the books he reads are the people that come to him,”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“Quite unselfconsciously she ran her hands along her neck, all along the sides and then to the back to feel the stiffnesses, and though she had not asked me I felt without the words that she wished me to massage her and I did, searching out the knots and the crick, then along the nape, under her swallow, holding the bowl of her head in my hands, entreating her to let go, to let go of all her troubles”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“Silage making is more practical than saving hay. When you watch an animal die you think how sad it must be to see a human die. My best days I have seen out.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“If I could feel like myself I’d thank God but I don’t feel and never will.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening

“There was a cry that must have been mine”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“My mother is dead, my mother is dead,” she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled,”
― Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

“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, The Light of Evening