Quotes from Heather O'Neill

That's what money wanted. It wanted to be spent. And it really wanted to be spent on luxury items. Its greatest thrill was just to be gambled away. It wanted to change hands. It wanted to find itself at the racetrack, it wanted to be thrown into the center of the table at a casino. Money is a masochist.

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 were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.

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.

You can learn how to be an aristocrat by following a few rules in a very short book. There is nothing to it." He gave the boy a small copy of a book called Manners for the Perfect Gentry. He taught Pierrot to hold his chin up higher and to cry out that he didn't know why on earth he wasn't in Italy.

Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth, I said and stormed inside. Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door, Hugo called after me.

Lonely children probably wrote the bible

The only people who had any actual grasp on morality were the under-eight demographic. They hadn't created all sorts of loopholes in their understanding of it. Children are born with eyes as large as those of adults. Children keep theirs wide open. And children know, without a doubt, that there is a difference between right and wrong.

Nothing really matters on a Sunday," his muffled voice said from under the jacket. "Everybody gets to have a day off from who they actually are. Don't you think? Your crimes don't count, your achievements don't matter. You just have to curl up in your bed and take a lovely siesta. You are both nothing and everything in your dreams." What

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

You have to create thoughts from scratch, Piglet. And as for the ingredients, you need love, wisdom, terror and acceptance. You have to put all these emotions together in order for them to be big and bold and gigantic ideas that you can be proud of and truly call your own. These are the kinds of thoughts that are free and original and can change the world.

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.

Every time that you read a book, it is like depositing money in the bank. You spend every weekend reading a pile of books this big, I swear to you that you are going to be a rich man.

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.

When he was a baby, he didn't do much of anything at all. He wouldn't even sit up but just lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

They all dressed like crack addicts. A boy wore a white leather belt as a tie.

I wanted desperately to belong to someone. It didn't really matter who.

People became free in literature first. It was through books that new ideas entered the general population.

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four 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.

The girls were playing in the labyrinth in Marie's garden one afternoon when they declared their love for each other. Every declaration of love is a magic incantation. It casts a spell on your future.

all women are unknowable. They all have at least one secret that they are keeping from everybody else. A secret that changes everything you thought about them.

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

Felix was in his room singing into a tape recorder then playing it back and exclaiming, "My God. Do I actually sound like this? All this time I thought that I was a great singer, but I don't have any talent whatsoever!

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

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.