Quotes from book

White Oleander

“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

“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.”

“Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.”

“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”

“And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

“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.”

“You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you”

“We received our colouring from the Norsemen, hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.”

“But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.”

“What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.”

“Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.”

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

“A womans mistakes are different from a girls”

“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.”

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”