Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander” Quotes (86 Quotes)

I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the woodstove.

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful.

I'm a fish swimming by Ray. Catch me if you want me.

Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.

I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

There was no God there was only what you wanted.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.

To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.

Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

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.

Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.

We have no home, she told me. I am your home.

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

She cut a small piece of the gravalax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintily spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music.

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.

His voice was cloves and nightingales.

I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

We recived our colouring from the Norsemen,hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees.We are the ones who sacked Rome.Fear only feeble old age and death in bed.Don't forget who you are.

How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?

I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.

It's such a liability to love another person.

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.

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.

Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

She was my life raft, my turtle.

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

How many people ask you to come share their life?

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

Let me tell you a few things about regret...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 in 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?

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.