Quotes from Asking For It

Louise O'Neill ·  346 pages

Rating: (9.8K votes)


“They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“I am not falling apart. I am being ripped at the seams, my insides torn out until I am hollow.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It



“Is it possible to want everything to change and nothing to change, all at the same time?”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“I like it better when my room is pitch black, when the dark is so thick it swallows me up and I feel as if I could drown in it.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


“What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"

"I don't know, Em." Bryan takes a gulp from his water bottle. "It's a bit slutty, isn't it?"

I stare pointedly at the FHM poster Blu-Tacked on the wall opposite the bed, of some topless model, one finger in her mouth, the other hand reaching into her knickers.

"That's different.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It


About the author

Louise O'Neill
Born place: in Cork, Ireland
Born date February 24, 2018
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“People who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.”
― Alice Miller, quote from The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self


“Love can only be found in freedom of choice. And for choice to exist, there must be an alternative to choose. Something as compelling as love.”
― Ted Dekker, quote from Showdown


“Whenever one asks “Why?” in science, one actually means “How?”. “Why?” is not really a sensible question in science because it usually implies purpose and, as anyone who has been the parent of a small child knows, one can keep on asking “Why?” forever, no matter what the answer to the previous question. Ultimately, the only way to end the conversation seems to be to say “Because!”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, quote from A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing


“Sometimes,” he said after a second that lasted a million years, “things get broken. And they can’t be fixed.”
― Megan Hart, quote from Broken


“Jack: "..You were the on­ly one I saw when I closed my eyes"
Lexi: "Then why wasn't I enough when they were open?”
― K.A. Linde, quote from Avoiding Commitment


Interesting books

The Name of the Rose
(240.1K)
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
The Scarlet Letter
(590K)
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hush, Hush
(489.3K)
Hush, Hush
by Becca Fitzpatrick
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
(488.9K)
The Five People You...
by Mitch Albom
The Godfather
(281.2K)
The Godfather
by Mario Puzo
In Cold Blood
(427.6K)
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.