Oleander Quotes & Sayings

Dried the flowers myself. Belladonna, oleander, and mistletoe. Three of my favorites. All of them poisonous ... but such lovely colors. — Anthony Horowitz

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental. — Janet Fitch

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

Thank you for your bounty, Oleander, Prince of Poisons, I think. Thank you for all that Mr. Pratt has already received, and all that my father is receiving still, as the poison twists like bramble in his gut, burns within his brain, presses like a boulder upon his heart. — Maryrose Wood

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

At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors' fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else's dumpster. She wasn't talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon. — Janet Fitch

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

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. — Janet Fitch

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

And Miss Oleander Coy had herself a blue mouth. Little stains at the edges of her raspberry lips where she put her pen when she was thinking, which was always. — Catherynne M Valente

What's real is always worth it,' she explained to me. 'Look how it's made.' She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. 'You'll wear it your whole life. — Janet Fitch

Never let a man stay the night," she told me. "Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic. — Janet Fitch

The people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air. — Janet Finch

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

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. — Janet Fitch

Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it's all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you'll head for hell! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

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

I grew up in Kolkata in a traditional family. We had friends who lived in mansions just like the one in 'Oleander Girl.' Growing up, I was fascinated by the old house and the old Bengal lifestyle. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there's savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed ... all here in Pico Mundo."
"And we call her Mother Nature."
"There's nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either," Ozzie said. — Dean Koontz

She's not as pretty as you," I said
"But she's a simpler girl," my mother whispered. — Janet Fitch

foxglove

IN THE

oleander

RIGHT DOSE

moonseed

EVERYTHING

belladonna

IS A POISON

love. — Maryrose Wood

I continue to be immensely moved by the impermanence of hotels: not in any mundane Travel-and-Leisure way but with a fervor bordering on the transcendent. Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room, the Camellia Room, the Oleander Room. Opulence and splendor, breezy corridors that swept into something like eternity and each room with its different colored door. Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows
but maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look! — Donna Tartt

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them. — Janet Fitch

Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her. — Janet Fitch

Do you know what gardenias smell like?"
"Yes."
"That's what it's like to be glad. You wake searching for the smell of gardenias. Or the smell of oranges. Or the smell of agaves. Or the smell of rosemary. And you think, God, I can smell. And you walk out and you see the light falling on everything - on the delicate leaves of a mesquite or the brilliant white of an oleander in bloom that almost blinds you or the bougainvillea that explodes pink like a firecracker. And you think, God, I can see. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning, the reason is simple, I couldn't understand the beginning until I had reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, too much you would never tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them, but I'd set all this on fire first. She'd like that, that's what she would do. She'd make it just to burn it. I couldn't afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky, has ever been as clear and sharp as it was when I belonged to her. I don't know how to express the being with someone so dangerous is the last time I felt safe ... (White Oleander) — Janet Fitch

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange."

~ White Oleander — Janet Fitch