The Little Red Chairs Quotes

“You would not believe how many words there are for 'home' and what savage music there can be wrung from it.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“I had not realized how far gone she was and how much she dreaded the homecoming, the ghost. 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, The Little Red Chairs

“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, The Little Red Chairs

“My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“We were a bookish family. we loved our books, but before long they were lined up next to the stove and my mother and my uncle fought over which should go first and which should be saved to the very last. The Iliad was a beautiful first edition, the pride of our library, but it too went: Agamemnon, king of men, Nestor, flower of Achaean chivalry, the Black Ships, Patroclus' corpse, Helen's bracelets, Cassandra's shrieks, all met the flames, for he sake of two or three suppers. My uncle was loath to let Mark Twain go...Huckleberry Finn and his river did not deserve such an ignominious end.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“In the first dusk he walks back. Flowers and fallen confetti, from a wedding two days earlier, lie trodden on the wet grass and he knows in his heart that he is sure who he man was, but that nobody in the whole world, not even Tommy, not even Ivan, would believe him.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“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 with truth.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“The wall was a symbol of protests, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“The question that perplexed him was how to get back the something he had lost. That something lost to modern man, call it soul, call it harmony, call it God. By withdrawing from the world and giving himself up to the magic carpet of learning, he entered, as he said, the rose garden of knowledge, esoterica, dream divination and trance. With careful study he arrived at a simple observation, which is the analogy of opposites and from that he hit upon the idea of combining ancient medicine with modern science, a synthesis of old and new, the one enriched by the other.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“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, The Little Red Chairs

“The difference in their age had begun to matter, she had just turned forty and Jack was in his sixties, no longer the 'Brooding Heathcliff' that used to sign birthday cards to her. He wanted less and less to meet people, keeping her to himself, shutting the world out, drawing the heavy velvet curtains too early on a bright evening. If she announced that they might invite a few friends, he worried, began to wonder what time these friends might arrive and more importantly, what time they would leave.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs

“It was Fidelma's favourite walk, a winding path by the river in the Castle grounds. The Castle with its turrets and ivied walls was a five-star hotel which attracted celebrities and regulars who came for the fishing and shooting. She could do that walk in her sleep, over the bridge, down three steps, by a sign that read 'Please Close the Gate' and all of a sudden the sound of the river, squeezing its way under the bridge and then bursting out as it opened into a wide sweep, making its way upstream, girdling the small islands that it passed. The sound was like water bursting in childbirth, or so a woman who had had many children once told her, and she remembered it.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs