Edna O'Brien Quotes

When we die our entire legacy is simply the added together strengths of all the connections we make with others. This is the ghost of ourselves we leave behind. This is showing up.

I'm honored that I'm in history, but I don't think it would mean anything if it doesn't change anything.

When success comes, it changes everything, so I'm interested in portraying what that's like, and I think I have a lot of connection with that.

There is a certain immortality in the change that another person effects on another person.

To me, a life that doesn't change things and touch people's lives is pretty meaningless.

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.

And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There's no getting over that.

I've decided that I can also touch the hearts of many - dead people, but the living, too. (Cameryn Mahoney)

If you help one person in the room, you're an abject failure. You have to change something.

I hope, when I stop, people will think that somehow I mattered.

One way to evaluate your own reputation is to think about what would be said of you at your eulogy.

I'm a catalyst for change. You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

I think the people we meet in life and the loves of our lives are very, very important in what we become, like change us - when it's right, probably change us for the best.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

I really had to imagine the kind of person that I would have been if I had never left my hometown. I don't think I would have been a very pleasant person.

I want to be able to say on my deathbed that I reached a few people. That would be very nice, just to be able to say that.

I'm not trying to steer people in a direction. I'm just trying to move them. Wherever it takes them, it doesn't matter to me. I just want them to be moved in one way or another, and that's a hard thing to do, I think.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

If your life changes, we can change the world, too.

Success did change me. You don't want it to, but it does.

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.

Death can never kill an idea. Ideas are more powerful than death. Ideas outlive men and can never be destroyed.