White oleander Quotes

“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”

“I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.”

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

“This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.”

“The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. 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, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.”

“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.”

“His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.”

“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.”

“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.”