Country Girl

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Brush those tears from your eyes And try and realize That from now on I'll always be true. I went away But I didn't mean to stay And I will regret it until my dying day.

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

The words ran away with me.

Oh dark woman With a shawl and ribs I could have served him better With my shanties. But men do love the shimmer And so his ghost Is hacked in half between us The dark me and the dark you.

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things." Edna O'Brien, short story "Sister Imelda", in "Returning".