White Oleander Quotes

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

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

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest - where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge. ~ Janet Fitch

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange."

~ White Oleander ~ Janet Fitch

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

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

Things weren't real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you'd have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you. ~ Janet Fitch, White Oleander

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

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

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

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

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

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed. ~ Janet Fitch

The White House has announced that they no longer recognize Fox as a news organization, which puts them about eight years behind the rest of us. ~ David Letterman

Commuter - one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides back to shave again. ~ E.B. White

APPLES SCENT,
You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ?
Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long ....
But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up.
You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked.
Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation.
Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness ~ Philippe Delerm

We linked hands - my ex-boyfriend, my boyfriend, and my former friend-then-enemy-then friend and I - and walked through a door to see if maybe empty carbs were good for something after all. ~ Kiersten White

Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty. ~ T.H. White

But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout. ~ Caroline Criado Perez

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin. ~ Angela Carter

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White ~ James Baldwin

«Couldn't never be nothin' but a nigger, if I was ever so good,» said Topsy. «If I could be skinned, and come white, I'd try then.» ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

One thing is clear: One cannot understand the Nazi vocabulary adequately if one only looks at Germany. What is the "blood disgrace" of which 'Mein Kampf' warns – as we have seen – if not the "miscegenation" that is condemned also by the proponents of 'White Supremacy'? Even the key term of Nazi-ideology 'subhuman [Untermensch]' is a translation of the American 'Under Man'! ~ Domenico Losurdo

Nat King Cole was a really big influence. ~ Bryan White

Aliena was concentrating. Their painted wooden board was shaped like a cross and divided into squares of different colours. The counters appeared to be made of ivory, white and black. The game was obviously a variant of merrels, or nine-men's-morris, and probably a gift brought back from Normandy by Aliena's father. ~ Ken Follett

The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure. ~ Olivia Laing

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color – because you don't want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing. ~ Tibor Kalman

Then I began, as though I had never seen my shoes before, to study their expression, their mimelike movements when I moved my toes, their shape, and the worn-out leather they had; and I discovered that their wrinkles and their white seams gave them an expression, provided them with a face. Something of my own being had gone over into these shoes, they struck me as being a ghost of my "I," a breathing part of myself. . . . ~ Knut Hamsun

How could a man "disappear" amidst all those elite law enforcement officials? Would things have been different if we were in charge? ~ Mark M. Bello

I'm the only person on Earth who's not afraid to admit that black people are better dancers than white people! I said it, I said it! You were all thinking it, I said it! ~ Carlos Mencia

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don't even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I'm not sure that their dichotomies apply to me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention. ~ Damon Galgut

And her face was white as a sheet despite the burning glory of the Lord's sunshine. Padre! ~ Stephen King

It's hard to just kinda get some privacy and do your own thing. ~ Shaun White

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. ~ H.L. Mencken

Fun-run" indeed,what a misnomer. That'd be like saying "calm gremlin" or "pleasant hag." Or 'entertaining history textbook. ~ Kiersten White

The worst part about being a prosecutor, in Matt Houlihan's opinion, 2as that even when you won, you didnt. The world was too black and white for that ... It was like securing the bull after he'd careened through the china shop - yes, you could pen him for a whole, but you still incurred the cost of the mess he'd left in his wake. ~ Jodi Picoult

Only after the rise of the Nazi party and the atrocities of the Holocaust was racial science widely rejected. Subsequently, many earlier proponents of racial science began to retract or modify the claims of their previous work, and by the end of World War II, scholarly interest in race had shifted from "proving" the science of race to challenging its ontology and examining the root of racial prejudice. Then, in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement drew widespread visibility to southern racism, many Whites attempted to distance themselves from the image of the "mean racist" by abandoning any mention of race altogether. This was especially the case with respect to whiteness. Having thoroughly identified whiteness with White supremacists, many Whites simply stopped thinking of themselves as White. They crafted a color-blind racial ideology that reinforced the idea that noticing, acknowledging, or talking about race was undesirable. Likewise, noticing, acknowledging, or talking about racism was also undesirable. ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

All day the storm lasted. The windows were white and the wind never stopped howling and screaming. It was pleasant in the warm house. Laura and Mary did their lessons, then Pa played the fiddle while Ma rocked and knitted, and bean soup simmered on the stove.
All night the storm lasted, and all the next day. Fire-light danced out of the stove's draught, and Pa told stories and played the fiddle. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Jack was mid-jump when I burst into my room. I snatched his ankle,flipping him horizontal.He crashed down hard to my bed and rolled off onto the floor.
And laughed.
"Let's do that again! But this time I'll jump even higher."
"No! No,you won't! What are you going here?"
He sat up on the floor and shrugged. "I was bored."
"I don't care! I'm not your babysitter!"
His blue eyes twinkled.Honestly, whose eyes actually twinkle? Then his face crumpled,his lower lip jutting out.He blinked his ridiculously long eyelashes at me. "I thought we were friends."
"Oh,knock it off. ~ Kiersten White

Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them. ~ Malorie Blackman

The girl's arms glisten in the sunlight like porcelain. "An example," she says.
"Look at the painting," Miss Saeki says. "Just like I did."
White sands of time slip through the girl's slim fingers. Waves crash softly against the shore. They rise up, fall, and break. Rise up, fall, and break. And my consciousness is sucked into a dim, dark corridor. ~ Haruki Murakami

She gave so freely. Out of her plenty, yes - but not just that. She gave of her heart, of her soul. She gave in her loneliness and she gave in her friendships and she gave in her hurt and her pain. ~ Roseanna M. White

Paul Konerko is one of the greatest players in White Sox history, not only for his strength and performance on the field, but also for his heart and leadership off the field. ~ Jerry Reinsdorf

And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

After the creation of Adam every living creature was brought before him to receive its name; he saw that to each had been given a companion, but among them "there was not found an help meet for him." Among all the creatures that God had made on the earth, there was not one equal to man. And God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." Man was not made to dwell in solitude; he was to be a social being. Without companionship the beautiful scenes and delightful employments of Eden would have failed to yield perfect happiness. Even communion with angels could not have satisfied his desire for sympathy and companionship. There was none of the same nature to love and to be loved. ~ Ellen G. White

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. ~ Laura Florand

Just as there are different types of stars - red and white and brown and blue and dwarf and giant and all that lot - there are different types of Quests, and if we determine what type you face, we shall have a much easier time managing the whole business. We're doing very well. Already we know that Prince Myrrh is an Endgame Object Type W - that's Wonderful, since we have yet to see if he will be any Use in governing. He sleeps suspended in a Theseus-type narrative matrix, however he does seem to have some gravitational pull on events, which is unusual for a T-Type. After all, we still remember him even after all these years. It's far easier to forget something than to remember it. Remembering takes all kinds of magic. No one knows who he is or what he looks like or where to find him, and yet we all know of him. We all know he sleeps in an unopenable box on an unbreakable bower. That's a frightfully strong E.K.T. Field for one little creature! ~ Catherynne M Valente

The right thing to do is so easy to see when you're seventeen years old and don't have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you're grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn't a tidy little arrow pointing to it. ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

If only we could see ourselves with our hearts, not our eyes. ~ Jeffrey A. White