Quotes From "White Oleander" By Janet Fitch

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Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you. Janet Fitch
Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to...
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Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them. Janet Fitch
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Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. Janet Fitch
And if there is no god? You act as if...
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And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing. Janet Fitch
The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out,...
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The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me. Janet Fitch
What can I say about life? Do I praise it...
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What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest? Janet Fitch
The phoenix must burn to emerge.
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The phoenix must burn to emerge. Janet Fitch
Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the...
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Always learn poems by heart. 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. Janet Fitch
Always learn poems by heart, ' she said. 'They have...
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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. Janet Fitch
I took the volume to a table, opened its soft,...
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I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season. Janet Fitch
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife,...
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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. Janet Fitch
She would be half a planet away, floating in a...
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She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed...
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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 Janet Fitch
15
My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean. Janet Fitch
I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't...
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I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare. Janet Fitch
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I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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Never let a man stay the night, ” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic. Janet Fitch
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...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted. Janet Fitch
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The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad. Janet Fitch
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Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic. Janet Fitch
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Don't sulk. you're acting just like a man. Janet Fitch
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Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy. Janet Fitch
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Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way. Janet Fitch
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Loneliness ia a human condition Janet Fitch
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I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest– where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge. Janet Fitch
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You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem. Janet Fitch
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Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you. Janet Fitch
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Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. Janet Fitch
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I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tellme more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, itwas base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many timeswith my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they justneeded to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was theway I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it. Janet Fitch
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A womans mistakes are different from a girls Janet Fitch
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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. Janet Fitch
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Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person, ' he said. 'You can never go home. Janet Fitch
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You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you Janet Fitch
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Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind..... But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradels you. It's so soothing. I feel infinetly better now Janet Fitch
47
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine. Janet Fitch
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I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."-white oleander Janet Fitch
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I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. Janet Fitch
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If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners? . Janet Fitch