White Oleander Quotes

#1. 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

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

Janet Fitch

#3. 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

#4. How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.

Pankaj Mishra

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Janet Fitch

#10. 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

#11. He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

Aldo Leopold

#12. In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. 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

#14. What does an introvert do when he's left alone? He stays alone.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler

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

Janet Fitch

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Janet Fitch

#19. Mrs. Ball has got a daughter who is a writer. I asked her how her daughter qualified to be one. Mrs. Ball said that her daughter was dropped on her head as a child and has been "a bit queer" ever since.

Sue Townsend

#20. We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

Janet Fitch