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68352fa
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People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could." --
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maturity
growing-up
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Heather O'Neill |
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f5eb25d
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From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.
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heartbreak
heart
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Heather O'Neill |
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c579aad
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Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are ..
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happiness
wanting
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Heather O'Neill |
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c004cec
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Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.
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Heather O'Neill |
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3aeca5c
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If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go hide in the closet for three or for hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.
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Heather O'Neill |
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1dba4bf
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Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.
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sad
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Heather O'Neill |
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28b0ddd
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Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.
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Heather O'Neill |
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21cad41
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Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.
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Heather O'Neill |
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d5ead8a
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When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart
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Heather O'Neill |
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8dccaea
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Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you turned twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.
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Heather O'Neill |
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0e33010
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The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.
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Heather O'Neill |
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7660894
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My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt.
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Heather O'Neill |
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6b77363
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On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
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literature
writing
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Heather O'Neill |
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5c2523d
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The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.
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Heather O'Neill |
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0f42503
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Sometimes when you are standing still and it's snowing, you think that you hear music. You can't tell where it's coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can't hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.
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music
life
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Heather O'Neill |
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4e194e8
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I've been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation m in an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born.Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.
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life
hobo
jean-michel
pg-81
montréal
drug-addiction
homeless
street
drugs
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Heather O'Neill |
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e07e9d7
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My conversation is probably something like the rain. On some days it pours, and then on other days there's just a clear sky- not a word in sight.
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Heather O'Neill |
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7fc1307
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Xavier wasn't put on the earth to witness the bad htings like Jules and I were. He had been put here to notice lovely things, things that God had created and no one had any complaints about. Leaves turning red in the autumn. How when the tide goes out, the shells are left on the shore. I was put here - Jules and I were both put here - to see sadder things. We had to stand in the rain and explain why the world was a lovely place.
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Heather O'Neill |
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e74bcab
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All children are really orphans. At heart, a child has nothing to do with its parents, its background, its last name, its gender, its family trade. It is a brand-new person, and it is born with the only legacy that all individuals inherit when they open their eyes in this world: the inalienable right to be free.
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Heather O'Neill |
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1e6f4eb
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Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn't just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone's cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection.
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sex
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Heather O'Neill |
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5e305ef
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When you are born and put into your crib, the whole world sticks their heads over the tops of the bars. They give you a name and they have all sorts of different ideas about you. ... But your task is to become something much more unique and surprising than anyone your parents could ever imagine you to be. You have to know that the life you have is completely yours.
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Heather O'Neill |
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22508b7
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The night was a typewriter key that got stuck and kept punching all the letters on top of the others until all that was left was a black blob. No word, no letter, no message in the night for me.
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Heather O'Neill |
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dc0fb21
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If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love.
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Heather O'Neill |
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ee4f415
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Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn't understand them. And women didn't understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight shining down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy. You were ..
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women
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Heather O'Neill |
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9f030c6
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Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.
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Heather O'Neill |
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0936057
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You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.
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Heather O'Neill |
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4941220
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Everything written by any woman was written by all women, because they all benefited from it. If one woman was a genius, it was proof that it was possible for the rest of them.
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Heather O'Neill |
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e1e4f7a
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A young girl's body is the most dangerous place in the world, as it is the spot where violence is most likely to be enacted.
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Heather O'Neill |
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9def224
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Many of them, like him, would never grow old enough to understand that you only go from one hardship to another. And that the best we can hope from life is that it is a wonderful depression.
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life
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Heather O'Neill |
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dd3f3c0
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Love is like this small room where a child brings you to show you all their treasures. First the child shows you all the new toys that are bright and shiny and top of the line. But then she shows you all the stuff that has ended up at the bottom of the trunk. There are dolls with eyes that wobble, hair that is falling out of their heads, and dirt behind their ears. Their fingertips have been chewed off by dogs and they have been drawn on wi..
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Heather O'Neill |
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859bcee
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When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.
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routine
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Heather O'Neill |
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7f78255
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Perhaps the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who believe in right and wrong but what they ascribe to as "right" and "wrong" is completely insane. They are bad with the conviction that they are good. That idea is the impetus behind evil."
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Heather O'Neill |
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05ed71f
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You know you're my best friend, right?' he said. I shrugged. I guessed it was true. Now that I wasn't going to be at the parade, they would all hate me. Everything had been carefully choreographed, and me not being there would throw them all off. I realized that kids like Theo and me weren't supposed to have real friends. We were supposed to be all alone and confused. By being each other's friend, we were defying our laws of gravity.
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lonely
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Heather O'Neill |
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7bd4ba0
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I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing.
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Heather O'Neill |
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81bd0b2
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When I thought about my old friends Linus Lucas and Theo, I realized they were not really criminals either. They were like me. We were just acting out the strangest, tragic little roles, pretending to be criminals in order to get by. We gave very convincing performances.
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pretending
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Heather O'Neill |
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e8068b7
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We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.
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Heather O'Neill |
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0fde8f6
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Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.
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Heather O'Neill |
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45acf63
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They often got my file mixed up and thought that I had gone to juvenile detention for being a prostitute. All I had done was date a pimp.
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Heather O'Neill |
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1b6846c
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Every day the average person will witness six miracles. But it isn't that we don't believe in miracles--we just don't believe that miracles are miracles. There are so many miracles all around us.
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Heather O'Neill |
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29e6dc4
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A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.
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Heather O'Neill |
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1c9d87c
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You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child.
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motherless-child
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Heather O'Neill |
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e8344f8
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I turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath.
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Heather O'Neill |
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7a06d10
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I went into the room and sat next to Linus on the bed. I put my hand on his shoulder. I was always surprised at how soft other people were. I thought I felt his heartbeat, although it could have been my own.
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Heather O'Neill |
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b0e93bd
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When you're young, sex doesn't mean as much, it isn't sacred. Children make the best prostitutes because they're th emost perfunctory about the whole encounter. The whole act is like a dare, like kissing a frog or something. It's nasty while it's happening, but you forget about it soon afterward. And sometimes it isn't even that nasty. Whatever it is, it's so far from love.
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Heather O'Neill |