Janet Fitch

“The world that was the emonation of divine had been reduced to a handful of dust. Thousands of people, all caught in profile looked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, rite now, in the privecy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didnt quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to. ”

“He was so damn perverse, he preferred to dream it than to make it come true.”

“These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain”

“Death disapearance was what you didnt talk about. like a sewer running under the street, the shit was down there, out of sight, but you could smell it, it didnt go away, it didnt vanish”

“Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.”

“You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.”

“her scruffy innoscense to impregnate with his dreams. reason was seductive, it gave the appearance of truth”

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

“It wasn't awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn't want pain, she wouldn't want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn't unthinkable.”

“history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.”

“what was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? everything beautiful was like that. a little bit of the true world. beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. time could rest for a moment, stop and that senseless motion. people thot beauty was bullshit, just a bandaide slapped over the abyss, but they couldnt be more wrong. beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything turned to shit. ”

“They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?”

“that was her edge. her secret weapon. she didnt give a shit.”

“He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.”

“at least if you were ignorant you could do wat you wanted. you had no idea wat had been acheived in the past. you were free instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid”

“their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form. who could just look at it as it is, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness”

“Knew what it was to loose him. That specific being. that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.”

“she was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway?”

“echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.”

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

“If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.”

“purification in fire. public cremation”

“Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That's what he'd seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.”

“for she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame. who in the world would have thot of her like that? when most people looked they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. but he saw past the mouth and the eyes. the archetecture of the body, her fleshy masquerade. other boys were happy enuf to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained by the bodys shadow theater but he had to come backstage. he went down into the mines. into the dark, brot up the gold. your new self, a better self. but wat good was it if he was jus gonna leave her behind. his poets lady, his silver lilly. he was a boy who knew things, things that looked one way but proved to be another.”

“here, here is my dark world. you carry it for a change. im out”

“Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.”

“If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.”

“I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.”

“What happened to a dream without a dreamer?”

“She was my life raft, my turtle.”

“The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.”

“I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.”

“My loneliness tasted like pennies.”

“He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.”

“His voice was cloves and nightingales.”

“I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.”

“If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the woodstove.”

“Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning, the reason is simple, I couldn't understand the beginning until I had reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, too much you would never tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them, but I'd set all this on fire first. She'd like that, that's what she would do. She'd make it just to burn it. I couldn't afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky, has ever been as clear and sharp as it was when I belonged to her. I don't know how to express the being with someone so dangerous is the last time I felt safe... (White Oleander)”

“It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.”

“Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....”

“The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?”

“It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.”

“Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.”

“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”

“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

“They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of of, mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

“I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?”

“Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.”

“How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.”

“Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. ”