When We Lost Our Heads

by Heather O'Neill

That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of.

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

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.

They were not permitted the luxury of being suicidal.

Louis opened the bottle and tapped a little out onto the back of his hand. He snorted it. He threw his head back and his arms up in the air. “We’re going to America!”

In the future there would be no male or female, simply people.

There was pink frosting all over her chin and black cake in her mouth. It was as though she had been buried alive in the ground, screaming with her mouth open.

You are wicked. How can you have even imagined these things, let alone write about them? You are poisonous.” “But did you think it was well written?”

As a philosopher once noted, you feel the loss of something until it is completely lost.

A criminal who disdains the law is a revolutionary.

Ordinarily if someone were to hit you with a shoe, you would either run away or try to defend yourself. But when a mother did it, the appropriate response was to cower. And ask her how she was feeling. And tell her not to feel bad for beating you.

Tears poured down her soot-covered cheeks, and the streaks revealed the colors underneath. Her face resembled a Renaissance painting being restored.

Anything a little bit magical is terrifying. God forbid you should encounter a miracle.