When We Lost Our Heads

by Heather O'Neill

As though she were a stain on the wallpaper your eyes eventually train themselves not to see.

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

There’s no one more brutal than a rich man without money.

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.

There was a pervasive idea that girls were all on the brink of madness. It took much less than anyone had previously believed to push a girl over the edge. A single novel could do it. A complicated idea could do it. Having ambition and wanting to have an occupation could definitely do it. It was too taxing on the female brain.

“You will inherit your father’s factory. They will all come for you because you are a young woman. You will have to be more cutthroat than any man. Take them all down or they will take what is yours.”

There was really only room for one sibling to shine in every family. And that role was for the eldest brother. Every family is a cruel, intransigent monarchy.

The world is terrified of a certain type of monstrous woman. That’s why they invented these ideas of ugly and beautiful.

It was true that a woman was weaker than a man in physical strength. But a woman was filled with rage.

Even if she were betrayed by a woman, she would accept that as a calculated risk. She could never tolerate being duped by a man.