White Oleander Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Whenever it gets too dark, think of the good things you have, the good times you've had. It will help. I promise. — Jim Butcher

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

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

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

As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself. — Shunryu Suzuki

At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy. — Blake Morrison

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

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

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

The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. — Carlos Castaneda

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 find that if I use my time well and take care of my mind/body when I'm outside of work, then I feel more supported throughout my day. So, instead of waking up and going straight for my cell phone or running to the gym, I take a few deep breaths, envision what I'd like to achieve that day, then rid my mind of anything that isn't going to help me get there. — Beth Riesgraf

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

The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy. — Charles Bukowski

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

He cupped her face, his eyes mingling with hers. "Stay," he whispered. "Please." She could deny him nothing when he looked at her that way. When he spoke to her that way. They'd stay for a week. Just one more week. What would it hurt? — Denise Hunter

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

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