Quotes from Janet Fitch, White Oleander

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

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

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.

And if there is no god?You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

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

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

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

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.

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.

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.

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