Janet Fitch - White Oleander (1999)

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That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

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

Janet Fitch
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. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked god if they could stay.

Janet Fitch
She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

Janet Fitch
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
She's not as pretty as you, I said But she's a simpler girl, my mother whispered.

Janet Fitch
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
We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

Janet Fitch
Without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.

Janet Fitch
The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.

Janet Fitch
And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

Janet Fitch
Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. 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.

Janet Fitch
She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

Janet Fitch
You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

Janet Fitch
She's never where she is,' I said. 'She's only inside her head.

Janet Fitch
Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.

Janet Fitch
I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

Janet Fitch
I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked...

Janet Fitch
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

Janet Fitch
Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Janet Fitch
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.

Janet Fitch
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
Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

Janet Fitch
I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

Janet Fitch