White Oleander Quotes
"Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you."
"It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love uses you. Changes its mind."
"Sin's a virus, that's what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap."
"But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield."
"We’re the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it."
"It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it's wrong."
"I liked the way the adults talked around me; they forgot I was there and said the most amazing things."
"Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife."
"I promised myself I would never fall in love. It was a promise I couldn't keep."
"People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd."
"He looked 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."
"I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then."
"She stretched me out at arm’s length to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders. 'Why would you think that?'"
"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."
"What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield."
"I loved his smoke, his smell, his sad hazel eyes. I couldn’t have him as a father, but at least we could talk like this out on the porch."
"She wrote back, a quotation from Milton, Satan’s part in Paradise Lost: 'What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield.'"
"I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels."
"Sometimes I read the tarot cards, but they were always the same, the swords, the moon, the hanged man, the burning tower with its toppled crown and people falling."
"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow."
"A woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s. They are written by fire on stone."
"Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space."
"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."
"In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. Nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
"You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air."
"I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
"I thought there was a meaning there, but she kept calling."
"Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt."
"Life should always be like this... Like lingering over a good meal."
"The secret is — a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell."
"Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."
"I was tired of the moon staring at me so indifferently, tired of the lunar landscape with the white rocks."
"Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness."
"Where children hugged broken-necked giraffes and cried, or else drove around in plastic Barbie cars."
"If I could have one wish, Jesus, it was to let my mother come get me."
"I wasn’t beautiful anymore. Now I looked like what I was, a raw wound."
"She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone."
"I eat out of the trash. Don’t ask me to wait."
"I didn’t bother to argue with her. I would never speak to anyone ever again."
"She would think up something completely the opposite, something you could paint on a Franklin Mint plate."
"I’m not the world’s most considerate person."
"I’m taking you somewhere you’ll learn to act right."
"I’ve stopped having my period," I said. "I eat out of the trash."
"But what about the other children? Don’t you care what happens to them?"
"I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast."
"I’d never cared about someone so much that I could feel their pain before."
"You’re the one good thing that ever happened to me."
"Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music."
"If something is wrong, you can’t just turn it to the wall."
"You can make a life here," they say. "Choose a mate, find new children."
"It is such a liability to love another person."
"Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life."
"Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it."
"You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words."
"The act by which my mother put her face on the world."
"I am your home," she’d once said, and it was still true.
"The sidewalks shrank under the sun. It was a landscape of total surrender."
"This was a chess game. First the urgency, then the waiting."
"Oleanders could live through anything... So what did they need poison for?"
"Fire was a flaming hoop the city would have to jump through to reach the blues of October."
"Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need?"
"I was making altars inside them. Secret, portable museums."
"No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California."
"To be my mother's daughter again. I played with the idea like a child with a blanket."
"But a disgrace. I’d rather starve. I knew how to do it, it wasn’t that hard."