Janet Fitch: Likeness

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”

“Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.”

“I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.”

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

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

“this was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces”

“Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”

“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”

“Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.”

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

“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

“Life should always be like this…. Like lingering over a good meal.”

“like a kid kicked out of class. humiliated and free.”

“I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”