Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.
Heather O'NeillIt never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
Heather O'NeillPeople 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, โIf this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.โ 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.
Heather O'NeillWhen 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.
Heather O'NeillOn 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.
Heather O'NeillSometimes when you are standing still and itโs snowing, you think that you hear music. You canโt tell where itโs coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we canโt hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.
Heather O'Neill