Edna O'Brien Quotes

I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Sometimes I see patterns in my mind. I dream about them at night. They drive me crazy.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

I don't think there is any kind of magic about what I do. All of the connections are there, somewhere in the subconscious or in the collective unconscious. If I let the elements speak to each other, then these coincidences will happen. And they do happen. They happen all the time.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

You must remember how to dream what you already know.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

Something happens when your subconscious goes to work... That's why 'Sleep on it' is an adage.