54 Quotes by Louise O'Neill

I like it better when my room is pitch black, when the dark is so thick it swallows me up and I feel as if I could drown in it.

I'm a good girl. I am pretty. I am always happy-go-lucky.

How is it that two eyes, a nose and a mouth can be positioned in such varying ways that it makes one person beautiful, and another person not?

She's beautiful, but it's a faded beauty now, as if she's been washed too many times.

That voice… My voice, it was my voice. How did Flora have my voice? How could I have thrown it away? The only time I was ever happy under the sea was when I was singing, and I sewed my mouth shut in the hopes that a boy I barely knew could kiss it open again.

He takes a glass from a passing waiter, but doesn’t thank him. He rarely thanks the staff, I’ve observed. All the little things that I have ignored about this man, in order to make the narrative of true love and destiny fit. I tried to make him as perfect as I needed him to be.

I was so stupid to come here, to give up everything that I have ever known, ever loved, in an attempt to seduce a human man. A man I didn’t know, a man that I had seen once and decided would be the answer to all of my problems.

I was born in the water and I was born of the water.

There was no one there to hear them scream no. Or maybe there was; but that no wasn’t deemed worthy of being heard. Maybe they heard it and they didn’t care. A woman’s no can so easily be turned into a yes by men who do not want to listen.