Janet Fitch, White Oleander
54 quotes
"Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."
"I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water."
"She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar."
"Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us."
"A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it"
"I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare."
"I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand."
"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
"She took a life because someonehumiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, thestainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So sheavenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because youfelt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you couldhave tolerated the humiliation."
"For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky."
"I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was.That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should havespent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'dhave had to change his whole philosophy. The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its finethoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch howeasily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain."
"This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives."
"We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us."
"Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic."
"...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted."
"I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water."
"That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific--chair, eye, stone--but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out."
"I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked."
"I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."
"Loneliness ia a human condition"
"She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad."
"Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic."
"don't sulk. you're acting just like a man."
"Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy."
"Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time."