Top 80 Barbara O'Neal Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A girl without a mother who protects her is a girl at the mercy of the world.”

— Barbara O'Neal

2. “Honey is a magic elixir – made from the tiny drops of nectar taken from hearts of flowers, carried by little bee feet to a secret cave where it is transformed by time into thick gold sweetness.”

— Barbara O'Neal

3. “There are seasons of darkness, yes? Loss and sadness all around.” He tightens his grip. “But if you are patient, the circle turns, and then there is happiness all around, everything good, everyone happy.” He flings a hand out, palm up, as if scattering glitter. “My friend, he just forgot that happiness is part of living too.”

— Barbara O'Neal

4. “Your quest is powerful. You needn’t apologize for the space it takes.”

— Barbara O'Neal

5. “I have a million questions, but they’ll be so much easier to answer if I don’t have to answer them alone.”

— Barbara O'Neal

6. “Vermicelli alla siracusana.”

— Barbara O'Neal

7. “When I saw you, I recognized you, like I’ve been waiting, all this time, for you to show up. And there you were.”

— Barbara O'Neal

8. “There are seasons of darkness, yes? Loss and sadness all around.” He tightens his grip. “But if you are patient, the circle turns, and then there is happiness all around, everything good, everyone happy.”

— Barbara O'Neal

9. “A passion is a good way to get through something.”

— Barbara O'Neal

10. “That isn’t who you are. You’re afraid. And you cannot have a life of great meaning if you make decisions out of fear.”

— Barbara O'Neal

11. “You couldn’t unsee a thing once it was seen, unknow it once it was known.”

— Barbara O'Neal

12. “A lifetime of secrets and lies later, I drive through the dark back to my neighborhood.”

— Barbara O'Neal

13. “I’ve carried a torch of hatred for my mother for so long now that it’s hard to even see beyond the straw woman I’ve made of her.”

— Barbara O'Neal

14. “I think of my admission that I haven’t had much happiness, and it suddenly seems ridiculous. What am I waiting for?”

— Barbara O'Neal

15. “A line of Shakespeare, lodged in my head from one of the only classes I ever attended regularly in high school, runs through my mind: “Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.”

— Barbara O'Neal

16. “It was as if their feet ran on parallel train tracks and pulled in at the same stations at the same time, over and over.”

— Barbara O'Neal

17. “Life had washed me here on this strange errand. Maybe the best thing to do was to just let it show me what it had in mind.”

— Barbara O'Neal

18. “He sat across from her and took her small hands in his own. “Babe, you don’t have to carry the world. I’ve got it, okay?”

— Barbara O'Neal

19. “I do know that it’s hard to be the children of parents who are obsessed with each other.”

— Barbara O'Neal

20. “Life is always a mixed bag.”

— Barbara O'Neal

21. “We drank hot chocolate and sat on the beach in our finery, and we were mermaids with our mermaid mother.”

— Barbara O'Neal

22. “Not for the millions and millions of people who are also plagued with this addictive thing in a world where it’s perfectly normal to drink, and keep drinking, and laugh about going overboard and even blacking out, and make Mommy-wine memes about the stresses of parenthood driving you to the bottle, and you have to explain why you don’t drink rather than why you do. If people quit smoking, the world says, “Oh hey, good for you.” If you quit drinking, they peer at you and say, “Why?”

— Barbara O'Neal

23. “Every girl needs a mother who protects her with a savage fury.”

— Barbara O'Neal

24. “The great tragedy of aging is not the loss of the supple body but the illusions we are forced to leave behind, one after the other, like a string of pearls from a necklace. That all will be well, that dreams can come true, that we can always do what we wish, that sacrifice and sorrow are not inevitable.”

— Barbara O'Neal

25. “Lost girls. I’d found them everywhere, all over the world, all longing for hope, for love, for an answer to their hungers in a world that did not honor them.”

— Barbara O'Neal

26. “I remember when my sister and I thought there were jewels in the ocean, dancing on top of each swell.”

— Barbara O'Neal

27. “Bookstores can solve any problem, at least for a little while.”

— Barbara O'Neal

28. “Resistance will break you. Kill you. The only way to survive is to let go.”

— Barbara O'Neal

29. “The great tragedy of aging is not the loss of the supple body but the illusions we are forced to leave behind, one after the other, like a string of pearls from a necklace.”

— Barbara O'Neal

30. “If you let people into the secrets of your life, the worst of it will always be at the forefront of their minds.”

— Barbara O'Neal

31. “Sleep is my superpower.”

— Barbara O'Neal

32. “Love is not always destructive,” he says quietly, and slides a finger up my shin. “Sometimes love creates.”

— Barbara O'Neal

33. “Only people without the kind of wounds she and I carried think you need to live it all over again. Not everything can be forgiven. Not everything can be healed.”

— Barbara O'Neal

34. “I know how much the ordinary dumb people of the world annoy me, so it’s hard to imagine how much worse it would be if you thought at the speed of light and everyone else thought at the speed of a tricycle.”

— Barbara O'Neal

35. “We’re all broken, says my therapist’s voice. I somehow have always felt more broken than most, but maybe that’s not actually true. Keep your head where your feet are.”

— Barbara O'Neal

36. “I like to read. I just don’t like to work hard to read. I like books that take me away the same way television or the movies do.”

— Barbara O'Neal

37. “Now that I know the truth about his childhood, our deep connection makes all the more sense. We were both lost children, and came together to make sure our girls were not lost. We might have had a lot of flaws, the two of us, but we gave our.”

— Barbara O'Neal

38. “My sister,” I reply without hesitation. “We had our own little world, just the two of us – it was full of magic and beautiful things.” “Mm,” he says, moving his palm lightly over mine. “What magic?” “Mountain Dew was an actual magic elixir. Do you know Mountain Dew?” He nods. “There were kitchen fairies and mermaids who moved things around to make the grown-ups crazy.”

— Barbara O'Neal

39. “I suddenly wish that I could sit with him like this many times, over many years. I can almost see a ghostly version of us, sitting in this same place, a decade or two out. His hair will silver by then, but those long lashes will still frame his lovely dark eyes, and he will still eat like this, reverently.”

— Barbara O'Neal

40. “I thought maybe there was somebody on the planet who knew what I knew, that a smiling face didn’t always mean well.”

— Barbara O'Neal

41. “I just kiss him. In the rain. On a ferry halfway around the world. Kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.”

— Barbara O'Neal

42. “For a moment, he only looks at me. “Your quest is powerful. You needn’t apologize for the space it takes.” He covers the hand he’s holding with his other. “That you take. You are important too. Not only your sister.”

— Barbara O'Neal

43. “Over the years, she’s created an urbane but kind shell that lets little of her true self leak through.”

— Barbara O'Neal

44. “My sister has been dead for nearly fifteen years.”

— Barbara O'Neal

45. “I haven’t had a lot of time to fall in love.” “Psssht. Love does not need time.”

— Barbara O'Neal

46. “The house was sliding down the cliff long before the earthquake hit, and everywhere the walls were cracked, the floors uneven and full of tripping hazards.”

— Barbara O'Neal

47. “But life doesn’t care if you like something. It gives you choices. It’s up to you to decide which things are right for you.”

— Barbara O'Neal

48. “What did you love as a child?” “Books,” he says with a laugh. “I loved to read more than anything. My father grew angry with me – ‘Javier, you need to run! You need to play with the other boys. Go outside.’” He lifts a shoulder. “I only wanted to lie in the grass and think about other worlds, other places.”

— Barbara O'Neal

49. “It fades relatively quickly, just a flash and gone. All these years, you’d think I’d finally get over the PTSD. But it doesn’t seem to work like that. My therapist says I spent so much time drinking and drugging away my trauma that it’s just going to take a long time to work through it all. And even she knows only the tip of the iceberg.”

— Barbara O'Neal

50. “But my dad told me a long time ago that the reason a lot of people fall on their faces is because they can’t handle big things without booze or drugs. You have to figure out how you can face things that hurt or burn or even make you really happy.”

— Barbara O'Neal