When We Lost Our Heads

by Heather O'Neill

I don’t find men good-looking at all. In fact, I find them all ugly. I would gladly never have to look at any of them ever again.”

Every declaration of love is a magic incantation. It casts a spell on your future.

And girls were always so attracted to one another.

Perhaps the winter didn’t have anything to do with temperatures. Perhaps it had to do with distance and loneliness.

Marie was stoned for two weeks.

The best way to get a girl to expose herself was to make her angry.

They were not at all encouraged to roam freely in their minds. It was as though their minds were dense forests. They were bound to get lost in them, panic, and lose their sanity.

There was a pervasive idea that girls were all on the brink of madness.

Each creature must stick to its natural life path. Otherwise all around us will be images of the grotesque.

“Don’t think of melancholia as passive. Melancholia is a state of deep thought one’s body enters into when it is looking for a way to act.”

“I wish I could always hold you like this,” Marie said. “I wish a giant spider would come along and cast a web that wraps all around our bodies. We would be in a cocoon together. And when we finally came out, we would be different, more incredible creatures. We would look and realize we had the same bodies, but they would have colorful wings that spread out from them.”

The only authority figure a girl ever had to worry about was her mother.

Single mothers can never keep anything from their children. They have no one to talk to other than them at night. They sleep in the same bed as them and divulge everything, as though they were lovers.

The rage of the masses has short-term memory loss.

A parent’s death was inevitable. The heart knew how to deal with it.

But when someone you love abandons you, a sort of madness sets in.

Writing was a form of exorcism. It made whatever was happening in your mind exist in another realm. Somewhere where it could be contained and you could make philosophical sense out of it.

There was no difference between public and private worlds as far as girls were concerned. They were treated by everybody as though they were their daughters; you could say or do anything you wanted to them. They lived in a permanent state of humiliation.

She was a girl who had been born inspired.

People became free in literature first. It was through books that new ideas entered the general population.

She hoped the hatred inside her would be enough to murder any fetus that tried to grow inside her.

She had learned that within the mind of any single girl lay the greatest pornographic works. The fantasies of any girl could compete with the greatest pornographic works written by men.

All the strict matrimonial laws were put in place because men didn’t want to have to stake their future on female desire.

“No. I have no interest in appealing to men rationally. We need to terrorize them. We should be in control first. And then they can ask us for the permission to vote. Men need to be held accountable for their crimes against humanity. There needs to be a reckoning.”

Whenever something was ruining your life, you began to value the old life that had been taken away from you so much more.

And once a book is in someone’s head, it has a way of spreading through ideas and conversation. And when someone who has read your book speaks to someone who hasn’t, they transmit the world of the book without even knowing it.

They would both have liked to control and contain the smiles on their faces, but they could not.

If she had control of the universe, everything would be pretty and perfect.

Jeanne-Pauline situated spousal abuse as the most heinous of all crimes. If a woman was abused in her own home, then she must immediately consider the domestic sphere a war zone, wherein all domestic instruments were seen as weapons. A woman had a right to bludgeon her husband to death with a rolling pin. She had a right to slit his throat with a steak knife. Jeanne-Pauline did not see these actions as self-defense but as terrorist acts that created fear in men throughout the city. And caused other women to feel more free in their houses.

Ordinarily, it might be called a smile. But it was so calm and deathly that it seemed to need a new noun.