Top 80 Barbara O'Neal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

9. “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

10. “Vermicelli alla siracusana.”

— Barbara O'Neal

11. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Life is always a mixed bag.”

— Barbara O'Neal

22. “Sleep is my superpower.”

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

24. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

27. “In Spanish, we say alma gemela. Soul twin.”

— Barbara O'Neal

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “I took myself back, made myself over, became a woman I am proud of.”

— Barbara O'Neal

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Do you want to know the secret of my transformation?” “Yes, please,” I whisper. “I learned to play guitar.” “And sing.” He nods. “And sing. And then, it was like a magic spell. I could sing and play, and nobody called me the little blind pig anymore.”

— Barbara O'Neal

36. “I sometimes wondered if I’d wasted my entire life on a quixotic quest. Had I done anyone any good, ever? Dark thoughts indeed.”

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Barbara O'Neal

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Because we spent so much time in the sun, we were tanned as dark as varnished cedar, and if he was the most beautiful boy on the beach, I was growing into the most beautiful girl.”

— Barbara O'Neal

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

— Barbara O'Neal

45. “Maybe I don’t have to choose between Dylan as a villain and Dylan as my beloved hero. Maybe he was both. Maybe Josie was – is – both too. Heroine and villain. Maybe we all are.”

— Barbara O'Neal

46. “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

47. “The truth is, when I arrived here, I was exhausted from years of foster homes, where I had to stay on my toes, then scrambling through undergrad, then grad school, trying to figure out how to make a name for myself, make a mark. Survival takes a lot of work if you’re an orphan woman in America.”

— Barbara O'Neal

48. “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

49. “Jandals,” I repeat. “Like sandals?” “Japanese sandals.”

— Barbara O'Neal

50. “The Mermaid Song”: “We there did espy a fair pretty maid, With a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand, With a comb and a glass in her hand.”

— Barbara O'Neal