“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
Louise O'Neill
Born place: in Cork, Ireland
Born date February 24, 2018
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“There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.”
― Elliot Perlman, quote from Seven Types of Ambiguity
“Most young men are such bores. They haven't lived long enough to learn that they are not the wonders to the world they are to their mothers.”
― L.M. Montgomery, quote from Emily's Quest
“Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Norman L. Geisler, quote from I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
“Your freedom and mine cannot be seperated”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
“Young Stalin Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Sashenka
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