Heather O'Neill > Quotes

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

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

“When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“All children are really orphans. At heart, a child has nothing to do with its parents, its background, its last name, its gender, its family trade. It is a brand-new person, and it is born with the only legacy that all individuals inherit when they open their eyes in this world: the
inalienable right to be free.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“The female body was particularly absorbent when it came to shame. If you wrung out any woman’s body, you would discover it was soaked in shame.”
― Heather O'Neill, When We Lost Our Heads

“Many of them, like him, would never grow old enough to understand that you only go from one hardship to another. And that the best we can hope from life is that it is a wonderful depression.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“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, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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 Lonely Hearts Hotel

“Xavier wasn’t put on the earth to witness the bad htings like Jules and I were. He had been put here to notice lovely things, things that God had created and no one had any complaints about. Leaves turning red in the autumn. How when the tide goes out, the shells are left on the shore. I was put here - Jules and I were both put here - to see sadder things. We had to stand in the rain and explain why the world was a lovely place.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“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, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“A young girl’s body is the most dangerous place in the world, as it is the spot where violence is most likely to be enacted.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“I've been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation m in an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born.Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“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, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“Every day the average person will witness six miracles. But it isn’t that we don’t believe in miracles—we just don’t believe that miracles are miracles. There are so many miracles all around us.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“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, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night