Top 100 Heather O'Neill Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Is there a difference between acting like a really intelligent person and being a really intelligent person?”

— Heather O'Neill

53. “Women aren’t mean the way that men are. They’re full of life and they’re like God in that way.”

— Heather O'Neill

54. “If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love.”

— Heather O'Neill

55. “She went around reading men’s minds. She went inside them as though they were bureaus and she were opening their drawers. She looked underneath folded articles of clothing. She found their dirty postcards. She pulled them out and had a look at them. And what lovely things she did find there.”

— Heather O'Neill

56. “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

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

— Heather O'Neill

58. “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

59. “We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.”

— Heather O'Neill

60. “Why had this good-looking moll chosen this effeminate buffoon, they all wanted to know. But Jimmy understood why immediately. Because he allowed her to be free.”

— Heather O'Neill

61. “They tried to look punk but came off looking more like cats with mange. Just.”

— Heather O'Neill

62. “But she would never have set eyes on him or given him the time of day if he hadn’t become filthy rich. His money had indeed bought him love. Given what he had seen of the world, the exchange of love for money seemed to be one of the commodities that never wavered – it was as dependable an investment as electricity.”

— Heather O'Neill

63. “In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.”

— Heather O'Neill

64. “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

65. “Being judged by society makes you disregard it altogether after a while. Jean-Michel didn’t know that he shouldn’t get a twelve-year-old drugs. He didn’t even really know what a twelve-year-old was.”

— Heather O'Neill

66. “Poor people knew that all good times had to be paid for.”

— Heather O'Neill

67. “We only really need one of a good thing.”

— Heather O'Neill

68. “She certainly seemed crazy. But she simultaneously made them think that there was nothing in the world wrong with being a crazy girl. And that maybe the world needed a couple more crazy girls.”

— Heather O'Neill

69. “We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night because we would all freeze to death shortly.”

— Heather O'Neill

70. “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

71. “Adolescents are still children in that they can’t yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.”

— Heather O'Neill

72. “But although she interacted with so many people during the day, no one could actually say that they were close to her. There is an aloofness to the permanently heartbroken, a secrecy. There was something impenetrable about her. There was a door that she had closed, which no one could get in.”

— Heather O'Neill

73. “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.”

— Heather O'Neill

74. “She didn’t know what it meant to always want to be close to someone. She wanted to have the same experiences as him. She wanted to hit him and have a bruise appear on her body.”

— Heather O'Neill

75. “There was a scent called Five Minutes Before It Rains. If you put it on your neck, whoever kissed you would cry.”

— Heather O'Neill

76. “I turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath.”

— Heather O'Neill

77. “She liked the idea of being ruined. She was curious to see what would happen to her if no man would marry her. It seemed like the most likely way to have an adventure.”

— Heather O'Neill

78. “Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things.”

— Heather O'Neill

79. “They don’t know. It’s not their fault. What are they supposed to do when they’ve been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales?”

— Heather O'Neill

80. “It was terrifying to have the responsibility of living in a world that was filled with so much wonder.”

— Heather O'Neill

81. “Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.”

— Heather O'Neill

82. “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

83. “A cat’s tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.”

— Heather O'Neill

84. “Men were taught to have so much pride, to go out into the world and make something of themselves. This Depression was deeply humiliating. Since women were taught that they were worthless, they took poverty and hardship less personally.”

— Heather O'Neill

85. “The home is the most ritualized place in a society; each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies.”

— Heather O'Neill

86. “Every family is a cruel, intransigent monarchy.”

— Heather O'Neill

87. “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.”

— Heather O'Neill

88. “I guess it was worth having your self-esteem destroyed if there was a free toy involved.”

— Heather O'Neill

89. “All the colorful lights had been turned off and the sky was the color of television static.”

— Heather O'Neill

90. “Violence never gives you a specific feeling that it’s time to knock it off. That’s because it is impossible to satisfy.”

— Heather O'Neill

91. “Rose had grown up in a room filled with sixty other girls. She was used to the intimacy of other female bodies. When a girl reached out a hand to her, Rose always instinctively grabbed it. Poppy was not used to touching other women. Poppy was that strange thing: an only child.”

— Heather O'Neill

92. “I don’t know why I was upset about not being an adult. It was right around the corner. Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That’s what you have 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

93. “It made me sick to my stomach thinking about why I’d been slapped. Slapping is never a good thing, but there should at least be some sort of legitimate reason behind it, like an exclamation mark needs to follow an exclamatory sentence. I remembered the teacher who’d made fun of me for doing that. You can’t just put an exclamatory sentence anywhere!”

— Heather O'Neill

94. “That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of.”

— Heather O'Neill

95. “You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.”

— Heather O'Neill

96. “Board games were invented to keep people from thinking so they won’t plan a revolution.”

— Heather O'Neill

97. “That’s the way I talked when I smoked pot. It was a gift. Every time I smoked up, these pretty phrases and ideas just popped into my head. Usually I went around with so many ugly insecure things flying around in my head that when a pretty thought came to me, it usually died a lonely death, afraid to come out. But when I was high, I simply had to utter it.”

— Heather O'Neill

98. “Her words squiggled onto the page like the laces of a girl running for her life with untied boots.”

— Heather O'Neill

99. “Drug dealers wouldn’t want to have anything to do with these pathetic specimens. You had to be relaxed and professional to associate with drug dealers.”

— Heather O'Neill

100. “Loving everyone is the same thing as loving nobody at.”

— Heather O'Neill