26 Quotes by Barbara O'Neal

You’re afraid. And you cannot have a life of great meaning if you make decisions out of fear.

I love Leonard Cohen, but he's not the guy you want on in the background when you're working or whatever.""Brilliant. I've studied his poetry, of course, but never heard him sing.""My mom loved him. She had a taste for dark themes, sad music- all that regret, you know- and Cohen has this great, deep voice, rumbly, raw, but it's the words that make his songs. He was such an old, old soul, especially about relationships.

I imagined a ball, visitors coming in from all over England, or perhaps a house party. Most of my idea of old houses had come from Downtown Abbey, and I imagined women in delicate Edwardian dresses headed for dinner, ropes of pearls and rubies looped around their thin necks. As if to accommodate my vision, I opened one of the doors to find a peacock-themed room, redolent with the fading colonial era.

I noticed a lot of magic realism- Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez and Alice Hoffman. I tugged down Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, a small book with an art deco cover, and a wave of warmth spread through me- it was one of my favorites, magic realism centered on food and sex. Leafing through the pages, I revisited the pleasure of the reading, feeling myself on a foggy winter day in San Francisco drinking hot chocolate.

I, however, am as trustworthy as a Boy Scout, as loyal as a dove.

Like everything else we'd eaten tonight, it took the ordinary to an extraordinary place- I tasted a thousand fluttering roses and a rain of sugar and the soft, spongy texture of the dumpling itself.

Instead of Coriander, I chose a French-style bistro, quiet and easy, where the server talked me into the braised rabbit, which arrived exquisitely tender in a gravy of such textured depth that I took out my notebook and scribbled a few notes on what I thought the ingredients might be. Thyme, rosemary, carrots, and parsley. Mushrooms and mustard and shallots.

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

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