Top 100 Heather O'Neill Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city’s underbelly.”

— Heather O'Neill

2. “Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.”

— Heather O'Neill

3. “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

4. “You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don’t ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.”

— Heather O'Neill

5. “I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing.”

— Heather O'Neill

6. “In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect.”

— Heather O'Neill

7. “Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That’s why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It’s when every child becomes an orphan.”

— Heather O'Neill

8. “I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.”

— Heather O'Neill

9. “All writers have the idea that they are famous.”

— Heather O'Neill

10. “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

11. “Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.”

— Heather O'Neill

12. “Perhaps the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who believe in right and wrong but what they ascribe to as “right” and “wrong” is completely insane. They are bad with the conviction that they are good. That idea is the impetus behind evil.”

— Heather O'Neill

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “She had fat arms, the type of arms that held sailors and soldiers and thieves. The kind of arms that held someone who was going away to jail for ten years. They were the arms of a woman who had eaten a hundred delicious cakes and pastries to get them this comfortable.”

— Heather O'Neill

17. “Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.”

— Heather O'Neill

18. “The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me.”

— Heather O'Neill

19. “What happened if an unwanted child gave birth to an unwanted child? It was as though she were in a hall of mirrors, except that instead of getting smaller in each one, she got younger and younger.”

— Heather O'Neill

20. “My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt.”

— Heather O'Neill

21. “A girl’s desire is like a pretty butterfly. And a man’s desire is like a butterfly net. His desire captures and kills her. He turns her into an object to be pinned on a corkboard. I don’t think I’m interested in the tyranny of the couple. I’m more interested in what a person does when they’re forced to be by themselves.”

— Heather O'Neill

22. “The piano was just now telling me how it feels so odd when it rains. The rain can cause you to suddently feel guilty for all the tiny crimes you have committed, like not telling your friend that you love her.”

— Heather O'Neill

23. “The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.”

— Heather O'Neill

24. “We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren’t waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.”

— Heather O'Neill

25. “When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart.”

— Heather O'Neill

26. “Fireflies danced around her like embers after someone has thrown a log into the stove.”

— Heather O'Neill

27. “We had started thinking of ourselves not in terms of things that we had done, but in terms of what we were going to do.”

— Heather O'Neill

28. “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

29. “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

30. “There is no real dignity in any of these costumes. If I’m a maid, I do what the owner of the house tells me to do. If I’m a nurse, I do whatever the doctor tells me to do. What are we as women, other than barnacles that attach themselves to higher life forms in some pathetic attempt to clean up messes? Tidy up what men have left behind- make the world a lovelier, better place for men. I would like to play a part in which I don’t have a superior.”

— Heather O'Neill

31. “Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object – such as a statue in the park – was struggling to keep itself together.”

— Heather O'Neill

32. “As soon as I looked at Alphonse’s face, I knew that he was dead. I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.”

— Heather O'Neill

33. “He had intense gravitational force. He was like Saturn because Saturn has so many moons. If I kicked my shoes up in the air, they would go into orbit around him.”

— Heather O'Neill

34. “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

35. “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

36. “The night was a typewriter key that got stuck and kept punching all the letters on top of the others until all that was left was a black blob. No word, no letter, no message in the night for me.”

— Heather O'Neill

37. “My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don’t know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again.”

— Heather O'Neill

38. “When you’re a kid, if you watch ‘The Jeffersons’ with your family at seven o’clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can’t use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.”

— Heather O'Neill

39. “Mothers took your problems from you and fretted about them for you, even if there was no reason on earth why they should, even if you had done everything to create your own mess.”

— Heather O'Neill

40. “Love should make you feel ten feet tall.”

— Heather O'Neill

41. “You have to know that the life you have is completely yours.”

— Heather O'Neill

42. “I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life.”

— Heather O'Neill

43. “In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn’t get.”

— Heather O'Neill

44. “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

45. “The soft sound of the rain on the rooftop sounded like young girls sneaking off in stockings to elope. She felt lonesome for Pierrot.”

— Heather O'Neill

46. “When I opened a book now, I was seized with desperation. I felt as if I was madly in love. It was as if I were in a confession booth and the characters in the book were on the other side telling me their most intimate secrets. 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.”

— Heather O'Neill

47. “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

48. “He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic.”

— Heather O'Neill

49. “BUT ALTHOUGH he was paying for her whole life, McMahon still wasn’t sure whether he truly possessed her. To make certain that he did, he tried to make Rose miserable. This was the only real proof that a woman belonged to you. Anybody could make a girl happy. It was only when a girl was in love with a man that he could ruin her self-esteem. He knew he would have to get around to that. He only had her for now.”

— Heather O'Neill

50. “You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels.”

— Heather O'Neill