Janet Fitch - White Oleander (1999)

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Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you!

Janet Fitch
We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

Janet Fitch
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
Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

Janet Fitch
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
I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Janet Fitch
This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

Janet Fitch
One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

Janet Fitch
Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.

Janet Fitch
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
Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

Janet Fitch
The night crackled... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.

Janet Fitch
Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

Janet Fitch
How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?

Janet Fitch
I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.

Janet Fitch
I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

Janet Fitch
The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

Janet Fitch
And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

Janet Fitch
I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

Janet Fitch
Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.

Janet Fitch
I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

Janet Fitch
I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.

Janet Fitch
Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Janet Fitch
Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

Janet Fitch
A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it

Janet Fitch
It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.

Janet Fitch
She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress

Janet Fitch
She wanted to wake up like Dorothy and see Michael's face peering over the side of the bed, laughing. WHY, YOU JUST HIT YOUR HEAD. But it was not a dream and there was no Kansas and he was never coming back.

Janet Fitch
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.

Janet Fitch
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

Janet Fitch