When We Lost Our Heads

by Heather O'Neill

Marie was immediately smitten by the manner in which Sadie complained about things. Sadie analyzed everything. She found everything wanting. Her distaste for the world around her caused her to visualize and desire more. Marie had never realized how intelligent being negative made you.

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

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.

“How do we deal with women’s suffering?” Jeanne-Pauline asked. “We say there must be a point to it, but isn’t the point of being human to push back against suffering? If we don’t push back, then we aren’t human beings really. There are other ways to testify to injustice than silence and pain.”

“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.”

Every family is a cruel, intransigent monarchy.

There is something that holds us like a magnet to the person who hates us the most.

The book had had its way. That was what a book wanted most: to have the most corrupt and devastating effect. To change the world of those who read it.

men did not like to be made to feel confused by women.

Once a parent is dead, you find yourself recalling the advice they gave you. You remember ways you disappointed them, with a full awareness that you will never be able to make things right.

The world is terrified of a certain type of monstrous woman. That’s why they invented these ideas of ugly and beautiful. They say we are beautiful now because we are young and stupid. But the more we accomplish and have to say, the uglier we are described as being.”

If you read enough books, they are bound to make a peculiar thinker out of you.”

The freedom that came with not being emotionally abused was exhilarating. It made every day seem like the most perfect day on Earth.

As is often the case when we leave someone, we expect they have stayed in the same spot we left them, as though they are statues frozen in time.

How could you not love someone who you secretly feared was better than you? And naturally their success terrified you because it meant they were going to move off to somewhere in the universe far, far above you. So, yes, occasionally you struck out against the love of your life.

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.”

It turned out that sexual awareness did not lead women to iniquity but toward empowerment.

This was why she was lonely and couldn’t relate to anybody. Her emotional life was meant to take place inside of a book.

She did not see herself anywhere in fiction. And she did not see herself in Sadie’s books either. They were a celebration of the female body, but they were not a celebration of hers.

It was as though she had no feelings. She was allowed to be observed and speculated about. Everyone believed they had a right to judge her. And this was what, in part, made her so lovable. They loved that they were allowed to hate her.

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.

what a triumph it was for any woman to have time for herself—and to be able to do something that benefitted her imagination alone.

To be alive is to be in a constant state of revolution.