Heather O'Neill Quotes & Sayings

He had intense gravitational force. He was like Saturn because Saturn has so many moons. If I kicked my shoes up in the air, they would go into orbit around him. — Heather O'Neill

Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object - such as a statue in the park - was struggling to keep itself together. — Heather O'Neill

Whereas the Greeks had Zeus and Athena, we had people who still lived in Verdun. They had a lot to bear on their shoulders. They had to invent the whole world themselves. They were supposed to have supernatural powers and achieve sainthood. When really they just found themselves peering into the mirror above the bathroom sink, looking to see how they were aging. Sitting in the bathtub, smoking a cigarette, terrified of death like the rest of us. — Heather O'Neill

Everything written by any woman was written by all women, because they all benefited from it. If one woman was a genius, it was proof that it was possible for the rest of them. — Heather O'Neill

The home is the most ritualized place in a society; each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies. — Heather O'Neill

Women aren't mean the way that men are. They're full of life and they're like God in that way. — Heather O'Neill

We had started thinking of ourselves not in terms of things that we had done, but in terms of what we were going to do. — Heather O'Neill

I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life. — Heather O'Neill

A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar. — Heather O'Neill

Linus Lucas was fourteen years old, a number that made the spoons fall right out of our mouths. — Heather O'Neill

Fireflies danced around her like embers after someone has thrown a log into the stove. — Heather O'Neill

A cat's tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye. — Heather O'Neill

He always had to act in an obnoxiously idiosyncratic way. — Heather O'Neill

I closed my eyes and the roof was gone. I could see the stars while the piano tinkled. I could see Jupiter and it was blue, and Neptune was silver like a tennis ball sprayed silver. I could reach out and touch it, like cold water. — Heather O'Neill

Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn't understand them. And women didn't understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight shining down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy.
You were often only an ethical question away from being a prostitute. — Heather O'Neill

They don't know. It's not their fault. What are they supposed to do when they've been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales? — Heather O'Neill

Humans were always more capable of evil than you could imagine. And they were also capable of more wonderment than you could ever fathom. People had come up with this city. And what was different between them and her? They had hands and eyes. They had imaginations. They went to bed at night, and they had funny adventures in their heads. Anything was possible. But the effects — Heather O'Neill

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly. — Heather O'Neill

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men. — Heather O'Neill

Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it. — Heather O'Neill

As soon as I looked at Alphonse's face, I knew that he was dead. I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear. — Heather O'Neill

When you're young, sex doesn't mean as much, it isn't sacred. Children make the best prostitutes because they're th emost perfunctory about the whole encounter. The whole act is like a dare, like kissing a frog or something. It's nasty while it's happening, but you forget about it soon afterward. And sometimes it isn't even that nasty. Whatever it is, it's so far from love. — Heather O'Neill

Intimacy makes you feel unique. Intimacy makes you feel as though you have been singled out, that someone in the world believes you have special qualities that nobody else has. — Heather O'Neill

I turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath. — Heather O'Neill

When you are born and put into your crib, the whole world sticks their heads over the tops of the bars. They give you a name and they have all sorts of different ideas about you.
...
But your task is to become something much more unique and surprising than anyone your parents could ever imagine you to be. You have to know that the life you have is completely yours. — Heather O'Neill

My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt. — Heather O'Neill

The night was a typewriter key that got stuck and kept punching all the letters on top of the others until all that was left was a black blob. No word, no letter, no message in the night for me. — Heather O'Neill

You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels. — Heather O'Neill

There are things that are permissible in sex that aren't permissible elsewhere. You can smack each other and tie one another up and pee on them and strangle them. That's when love shows its face. When love takes off its clothes and has a drink. It sometimes takes the most appalling forms. It made the night seem like it was going to last forever. — Heather O'Neill

Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different. — Heather O'Neill

If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love. — Heather O'Neill

You know you're my best friend, right?' he said.
I shrugged. I guessed it was true. Now that I wasn't going to be at the parade, they would all hate me. Everything had been carefully choreographed, and me not being there would throw them all off. I realized that kids like Theo and me weren't supposed to have real friends. We were supposed to be all alone and confused. By being each other's friend, we were defying our laws of gravity. — Heather O'Neill

When I thought about my old friends Linus Lucas and Theo, I realized they were not really criminals either. They were like me. We were just acting out the strangest, tragic little roles, pretending to be criminals in order to get by. We gave very convincing performances. — Heather O'Neill

Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn't just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone's cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. — Heather O'Neill

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go hide in the closet for three or for hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible. — Heather O'Neill

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it. — Heather O'Neill

I had to admit that I had a strong tendency to date jokers. I couldn't say no to them. I would sit across from someone I was dating and try to imagine who in the entire world would date this nimrod other than me. But I always had to have a boyfriend. They distracted me from being sad. They baffled me with their stupidity. I refused to believe that finding love was difficult. — Heather O'Neill

She had no business being a housewife, really. She probably had a mind built for the world's leading criminal investigator. She could be out in the world tracking down society's most heinous criminals or cracking enemy codes. Instead she was stuck in the house, focusing all her intellectual acumen and perspicuity on piecing together exactly what her husbad had been up to that evening. — Heather O'Neill

There was this professional hockey player that I liked. I imagined him watching at the parade and falling in love with me. It didn't occur to me that he probably wasn't interested in twelve-year-olds. — Heather O'Neill

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side. — Heather O'Neill

Love is like this small room where a child brings you to show you all their treasures. First the child shows you all the new toys that are bright and shiny and top of the line. But then she shows you all the stuff that has ended up at the bottom of the trunk. There are dolls with eyes that wobble, hair that is falling out of their heads, and dirt behind their ears. Their fingertips have been chewed off by dogs and they have been drawn on with ballpoint pen. It has been so long since they have been held or anyone has told them that they are lovely. They lie at the bottom of the toy chest, hidden and ashamed. You are either going to be disgusted by them, or you are going to be so filled with love for them that your heart almost breaks.
I took his hand in mine. — Heather O'Neill

In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect — Heather O'Neill

The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me. — Heather O'Neill

We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine. — Heather O'Neill

Perhaps the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who believe in right and wrong but what they ascribe to as "right" and "wrong" is completely insane. They are bad with the conviction that they are good. That idea is the impetus behind evil. — Heather O'Neill

My dad had told me that if you stayed out after nine and you were a girl it meant that you wanted to have sex with whoever was passing by. He told me that if I got raped after nine o'clock the courts would probably say I deserved it. — Heather O'Neill

There is no real dignity in any of these costumes. If I'm a maid, I do what the owner of the house tells me to do. If I'm a nurse, I do whatever the doctor tells me to do. What are we as women, other than barnacles that attach themselves to higher life forms in some pathetic attempt to clean up messes? Tidy up what men have left behind- make the world a lovelier, better place for men. I would like to play a part in which I don't have a superior. — Heather O'Neill

His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger] — Heather O'Neill

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine. — Heather O'Neill

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time. — Heather O'Neill

My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don't know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again. — Heather O'Neill

The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there. — Heather O'Neill

God knows who we became when we masturbated. It was like our desire was a spirit that possessed us and took over. — Heather O'Neill

You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child. — Heather O'Neill

He was and probably still is, to this day, the worst-smelling person I have ever hugged. But it was wonderful. He just wrapped his arms all the way around me. He hugged me the way that parents hug: with them doing all the work. — Heather O'Neill

Jules always told me not to tell people your business, not to tell them your past. He said to keep them guessing. He said that once a person knew all there was to know about you, they'd take advantage of you. Trust nobody, he'd told me over and over. In a way, I'd kept his advice up until just then. I was stoned and felt like sharing all my shit with the whole world. I wanted to be taken advantage of. — Heather O'Neill

That's the way I talked when I smoked pot. It was a gift. Every time I smoked up, these pretty phrases and ideas just popped into my head. Usually I went around with so many ugly insecure things flying around in my head that when a pretty thought came to me, it usually died a lonely death, afraid to come out. But when I was high, I simply had to utter it. — Heather O'Neill

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair. — Heather O'Neill

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy. — Heather O'Neill

That was desire messing with physics: putting its finger on the record and then slowing it down, making sure you heard every word spoken, and memorized it. — Heather O'Neill

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar. — Heather O'Neill

I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing. — Heather O'Neill

She had fat arms, the type of arms that held sailors and soldiers and thieves. The kind of arms that held someone who was going away to jail for ten years. They were the arms of a woman who had eaten a hundred delicious cakes and pastries to get them this comfortable. — Heather O'Neill

You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there. — Heather O'Neill

We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night because we would all freeze to death shortly. — Heather O'Neill

But although she interacted with so many people during the day, no one could actually say that they were close to her. There is an aloofness to the permanently heartbroken, a secrecy. There was something impenetrable about her. There was a door that she had closed, which no one could get in. — Heather O'Neill

The piano was just now telling me how it feels so odd when it rains. The rain can cause you to suddently feel guilty for all the tiny crimes you have committed, like not telling your friend that you love her. — Heather O'Neill

A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen. — Heather O'Neill

Boys are good at personas. There are a certain number that you can get at the drugstore, like costumes before Halloween. Being cool is pretending that you're not afraid of anything. But everybody is afraid. Everybody is afraid. — Heather O'Neill

I didn't know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me. — Heather O'Neill

The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn't accept it. — Heather O'Neill

What in the world do our clothes say about us when we put them on?" Rose said. "There's no real dignity in any of these costumes. If I'm a maid, I do what the owner of the house tells me to do. If I'm a nurse, I do whatever the doctor tells me to do. What are we as women, other than barnacles that attach themselves to higher life forms in some pathetic attempt to clean up messes? Tidy up what men have left behind - make the world a lovelier, better place for men. I would like to play a part in which I don't have a superior."
The director told Rose that she should save her philosophical speculations until after work because they were causing the male actors to lose their erections. — Heather O'Neill

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get. — Heather O'Neill

When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart — Heather O'Neill

The stars are always up in the sky ... then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come. — Heather O'Neill

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more. — Heather O'Neill

All writers have the idea that they are famous. — Heather O'Neill

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction. — Heather O'Neill

I find that I can't help being bad. I promise and promise and promise myself that I won't be a bad person. But then I just do something bad.'
'That's because we're girls. We're supposed to only have emotions. We aren't even allowed to have thoughts. And it's fine to feel sad and happy and mad and in love- but those are just moods. Emotions can't get anything done. An emotion is just a reaction. You don't only want to be having reactions in this lifetime. You need to be having actions too, thoughtful actions. — Heather O'Neill

My conversation is probably something like the rain. On some days it pours, and then on other days there's just a clear sky- not a word in sight. — Heather O'Neill

Whenever things were going well, I started to feel vain. — Heather O'Neill

I was trying my best to straighten out my life, but I always ended up in the middle of some festive waste of time. — Heather O'Neill

You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn't get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see. — Heather O'Neill

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction. — Heather O'Neill

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor. — Heather O'Neill

She was as secure as a sixty-year-old woman whose husband has never cheated on her. — Heather O'Neill

I stuck a barette with a silver star into my black hair. If I was going to be popping my head in and out of bars like a wife who was looking for her husband who had just got paid and was squandering all the money, at least I was going to look unbelievably fantastic while I was doing it. — Heather O'Neill

Many writers were picked on as children. Why? Because they were weird from the get-go. They were often to be found at the back of the class smelling erasers, or talking to caterpillars, or walking down the street with an encyclopedia balanced on their head. — Heather O'Neill

What kind of bird do you think these feathers come from?' she asked.
'I don't know. A swan?'
'You had better stop wearing those wings, then.
A swan might fall in love with you. And as you
probably know, swans mate for life.'
'You are a funny one, Rose. — Heather O'Neill

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. — Heather O'Neill

At dusk Pierrot found Rose sitting on a bench, facing the river. She was having morbid thoughts. She was descended from people who had come to this great land, killed off its inhabitants and settled in with their treacherous ways. Did you have a right to expect anything from God if you were white and North American ? — Heather O'Neill

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it. — Heather O'Neill

What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute. — Heather O'Neill

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan. — Heather O'Neill

When I opened a book now, I was seized with desperation. I felt as if I was madly in love. It was as if I were in a confession booth and the characters in the book were on the other side telling me their most intimate secrets. When I read, I was a philosopher and it was up to me to figure out the meaning of things. Reading made me feel as if I were the center of the universe. — Heather O'Neill

I'm a terrible person,' Pierrot said to her.
'I'm quite wicked too', Rose said, and she smiled at him.
Pierrot knew that Rose was punished every time she spoke to him. All her words were contraband, treasured items from the black market. A sentence from her was like a pot of jam during wartime. — Heather O'Neill

He said that if you were able to look at the crows really closely, you would see that their eyes were stolen baubles, like buttons or marbles.
To get real eyes, they had to steal them from children. Older people's eyes were too set in their ways of looking and would be no good for a crow. That's why people don't let their children out after dark. The crow who stole the eyes of a real child was king. With a piece of plastic they could just see what was in front of them, but with a child's eyes, they could see the whole world. — Heather O'Neill

He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic. — Heather O'Neill

Sometimes when you are standing still and it's snowing, you think that you hear music. You can't tell where it's coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can't hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat. — Heather O'Neill

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you. — Heather O'Neill