White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.
• 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.
• Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.
• Only peons made excuses for themselves. Never apologize, never explain.
• She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they'd been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T'ang Dynasty.
• She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.
• It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man's anything.
• Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
• How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?
• Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.
• It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
• 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. It's so soothing.
• The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence.
• You are the judge of what is true.
• I've got to believe in something.
• 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, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.
• Everybody needed to feel love.
• A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved.
• After all the fears, the warnings; After all; A woman's mistakes are different from a girl's; They are written by fire on stone; They are a trait and not an error...
• 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.
• You never knew when rescue might come.
• Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.
• At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
• What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. 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.
• You enjoy anything you're good at.
• What's real is always worth it.
• I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life.
• What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.
• Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness.
• When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
• Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
• I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
• 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.
• She's never where she is. She's only inside her head.
• Certain people should always be lied to.
• I don't think people should fool around with things they don't believe in.
• When you committed suicide, you didn't want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
• How long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?
• Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
• If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away.
• Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings.
• Perfect was always too much to ask.
• If something is wrong, you can't just turn it to the wall.
• Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
• People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.
• What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
• I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.
• People just wanted to be loved.
• Everybody left you eventually.
• Without my wounds, who was I?
• I never let anyone touch me.
• My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.
• "Love the One You're With" was the tune life kept forcing on me, and yet there I was, hope fluttering like a bird in my hand.
• You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.
• One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
• Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
• I knew nothing but that was the place to begin.
• I don't have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.
• I can't remake the world just by willing it so.
• What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned.
• How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
• What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.
• The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.
• The reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. You could to anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history.
• These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn't.
• You accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand.
• Nobody waited for anybody.
• Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child.
• Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.
• I had to face this, that people left and you didn't see them again.
• Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
• 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 in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them?
• You had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them.
• There was no such thing as an empty canvas.
• Stand up for myself, beat on the bars until I got what I needed.
• It's the century of the displaced person. You can never go home.
• I hadn't come this far to be left at some river bottom among the wrecked cars.

1/2/2009 12:09 AM