Quotes from Heather O'Neill

That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of.

They took turns looking deep, deep into the universe: Saturn like a knee that had been dipped in iodine, Neptune like a peach covered in mold, Jupiter like a half sucked jawbreaker, Mercury like a large shooter marble, galaxies like crushed candy, galaxies like the suds from a bubble bath blown off the palm of your hand.

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

Mothers took your problems from you and fretted about them for you, even if there was no reason on earth why they should, even if you had done everything to create your own mess.

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.

Being judged by society makes you disregard it altogether after a while. Jean-Michel didn't know that he shouldn't get a twelve-year-old drugs. He didn't even really know what a twelve-year-old was.

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.

Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn't know slang or how to curse. They didn't know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

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.

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.

What happened if an unwanted child gave birth to an unwanted child? It was as though she were in a hall of mirrors, except that instead of getting smaller in each one, she got younger and younger.

Rose had grown up in a room filled with sixty other girls. She was used to the intimacy of other female bodies. When a girl reached out a hand to her, Rose always instinctively grabbed it. Poppy was not used to touching other women. Poppy was that strange thing: an only child.

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.

Every family is a cruel, intransigent monarchy.

At night the monsters under the beds begged him to come make love to them.

She was as secure as a sixty-year-old woman whose husband has never cheated on her.

She'd never seen the ocean before. It was so vast compared to the rivers she'd seen. The sand resembled brown sugar. The seagulls leaped up and down as if they were at the ends of yo-yos. The waves made the sound of someone biting into an apple. When they crashed, they were a hundred thousand chorus girls raising up their dresses at once. And then the water receded again like the train of a jilted bride walking off into the distance.

You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels.

Violence never gives you a specific feeling that it's time to knock it off. That's because it is impossible to satisfy.

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 ?

You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn't get it. And they 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.

Board games were invented to keep people from thinking so they won't plan a revolution.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things.

I guess it was worth having your self-esteem destroyed if there was a free toy involved.