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Without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.
Janet Fitch
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We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
Janet Fitch
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I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money, and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Janet Fitch
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She's not as pretty as you, I said But she's a simpler girl, my mother whispered.
Janet Fitch
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I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. 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.
Janet Fitch
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The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.
Janet Fitch
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Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
Janet Fitch
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They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled...mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in...mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.
Janet Fitch
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How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
Janet Fitch
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I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
Janet Fitch
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Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.
Janet Fitch
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Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.
Janet Fitch
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The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.
Janet Fitch
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I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
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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.
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But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.
Janet Fitch
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Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.
Janet Fitch
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What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
Janet Fitch
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No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
Janet Fitch
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It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.
Janet Fitch
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She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.
Janet Fitch
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When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
Janet Fitch
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The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?
Janet Fitch
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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.
Janet Fitch
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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.
Janet Fitch
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Quote of the day
Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
Janet Fitch
Born:
November 9, 1955
(age 68)
Bio:
Janet Fitch is most famously known as the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon.
Known for:
White Oleander (1999)
Paint It Black: A Novel (2006)
Kicks (1995)
The Art and Craft of Jewellery (1992)
Beli oleander
Most used words:
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life
beauty
men
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women
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time
eyes
hold
feel
beautiful
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