Quotes from Heather O'Neill

Because they travelled together, they developed intimacy. This was something other orphans didn't have. 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.

But having a young parent meant you had to pack up your stuff in an hour and run away from a twenty-two-year-old from Oshawa who was going to be mad at you for having sold his guitars.

Most of us hide away when we are sad, Rose thought. But performers were sad in public. She liked how honest they all were. They opened up their hearts They took out every emotion-no matter how small or pathetic or odd-and celebrated it.

Marie felt an incredible coldness. She had stopped pursuing, even on an imaginary level, the one person she loved in the world. Sadie was no more. Sadie was dead to her. But she was not mourning Sadie, she was mourning the part of her that had ever loved Sadie. She had put aside a love for a father and now she was setting aside the love of her youth. In the coming days she knew she would become a monster. She stood on the balcony letting the metamorphosis happen.

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.

I decided to get my butt up out of the coffin, just like Jesus Christ, and come and chitchat with all my beautiful and soulful friends.

It was good to have an imagination if you were a girl and living in Montreal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Intelligence was what she needed. But she never listened to anyone.

And a one-night stand made you feel as if you had just been invented. You were with someone who couldn't quite believe in your existence … In longer relationships you end up having to think up all sorts of fantastic fantasies to be excited by the person. but now, the first night you are enough. Who really wanted to know themselves? Instead I could exist happily in this world of first impressions.

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.

We are all essentially only in wars against ourselves, but we don't like it to be so painfully obvious.

Rich people weren't responsible for petty crimes. They were responsible for the great crimes that took hundreds of years to commit and were, therefore, unpunishable.

Everything written by any woman was written by all women, because they all benefited from it.

What we needed was a love that was able to sine a light on who exactly we were, so that we could be people offstage.

How could we not look down on people when they were looking up at us?

There was a painting of Jesus rolling his eyes up at the sky in every room.

He did tai chi in the park with a group of senior citizens. … It looked like a ship had sunk and these were the passengers, slowly sinking to their grave at the bottom of the ocean.

All the people in the street had to rush up stairs and more stairs to close all their windows before the rain flew in. The laundry was being pulled in so violently that it screamed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you turned twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.