123 Quotes by Heather O'Neill

All life began underneath the ocean. So I'm giving people a taste of what existence might have been like before civilization.''But we were amoebas and tiny shrimplike creatures. We didn't start off in deep-sea-diving outfits.''We all come into this world with an oxygen tube in our belly button.''True.'She put her hands up to her own belly. There had so recently been a sea creature evolving in there, trying its best to get its act together. It had perished under the deep, deep, deep sea.

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair.

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.

Sometimes when you are standing still and it’s snowing, you think that you hear music. You can’t tell where it’s coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can’t hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.

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.

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

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.

Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you were twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.

Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth," I said and stormed inside."Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door," Hugo called after me.