QUOTES - The Lovely Bones and White Oleander Quotes

The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

 Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf…The penguin was all alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, “Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”

 Juan Ramon Jimenez: If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

 My favorite teacher was Mr. Botte, who taught biology and liked to animate the frogs and crawfish we had to dissect by making them dance in their waxed pans.

 “Tell me you love me,” he said. Gently, I did. The end came anyway.

 Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one’s strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant.

 There was too much blood in the earth.

 The fine wall of leaden crystal that had protected her heart—somehow numbed her into disbelief—shattered.

 Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see.

 My father had felt in that moment the first flicker of the strange sad mortality of being a father. His life had given birth to three children, so the number calmed him. No matter what happened to Abigail or to him, the three would have one another. In that way the line he had begun seemed immortal to him, like a strong steel filament threading into the future, continuing past him no matter where he might fall off.

 “Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.”
“Me too,” Ray said. “But I’ve lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.

 “She’s in heaven, if you believe in that stuff…”
“I do,” Ruth said. “I don’t mean la-la angel-wing crap, but I do think there’s a heaven...”
“But what does that mean?”
…Ruth smiled into her cup. “Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”

 My mother had drawn an orange poodle and what looked like a blue horse undergoing electroshock treatment.

 He came to realize something as he stared at my photo—that it was not me. I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying…He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn’t want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn’t want to look at me anymore, either.

 “This is not Susie!” her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter. (On her daughter becoming a vegetarian after Susie died.)

 “Do we have to kill them?” Lindsey asked. “It’s a better mousetrap, not a better mouse death camp.”
“Artie’s contributing little coffins made out of balsa wood.”

 “Let’s build a mousetrap with a little purple velvet couch in it and we can rig up a latch so that when they sit on the couch, a door drops and little balls of cheese fall down. We can call it Wild Rodent Kingdom.”

 “How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

 I wish a smile had come curling up onto my father’s face, but he was deep under, swimming against drug and nightmare and waking dream. For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness.

 What she said to the four-year-old about Helen of Troy: “A feisty woman who screwed things up.”

 I had played a hide-and-seek game of love with my mother as I grew up, courting her attention and approval in a way that I had never had to do with my father.

 Buckley went right from basking in the shine of Miss Koekle home to burrow in the empty cave of my father’s heart.

 That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream…The girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.

 Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

 He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

 I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

 I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there watching.

 I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing—braiding into a scar for eight long years.

 Even Buckley let loose, slipping out of the knot that usually held him and into a rare joy. But I saw the fine, wavering line that still tied my sister to my father. The invisible cord that can kill.

 “Hold still,” my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he’d raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

 The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. His amused her; she had noted in her journal: “booze affects material as it does people”.

 Ruth liked the antagonistic little dogs, who parked ardently as she passed.

 How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?

 “I fell in love with you again while you were away,” he said. I realized how much I wished I could be where my mother was. His love for my mother wasn’t about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything—for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose.

 [Your mother] has been great. A rock. A spongelike rock, but a rock.

 When you kiss me I see heaven.

 Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead—in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death—the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human—feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light—all of it part of navigating the unknown.

 He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.

 These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.



White Oleander—By Janet Fitch

 It was torture for me to try to fit in as a girl among other girls. Girls my own age were a different species entirely.

 “That beaky anorexic and that toupeed Chihuahua. It’s beyond grotesque. Their children wouldn’t know whether to peck or bark.”

 “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”

 I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.

 She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.

 “My mother hates Chekhov. She says anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a revolution.”

 I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what they made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?

 Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautiful. If you weren’t you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn’t always conform to my mother’s ideas.

 “Late. How despicable. I should have known. He’s probably off rutting in some field with the other goats. Remind me never to make plans with quadrupeds.”

 “That jacket is so ugly I can’t even look at you. Did you steal it from a dead man?...You look like a couch in an old-age home.”

 I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck.

 She was breaking her rules. They weren’t stone after all, only small and fragile paper cranes.

 [Fathers] seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us.

 I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before.

 Now I wished 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.

 “A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it’s not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me.”

 At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

 She took her X-act knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. “How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement.”

 “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind. But hatred, now. That’s something you can sue. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you.”

 That was a day with a trapdoor, and we all fell through.

 The earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were.

 I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep.

 They sent me to school. My name was White Girl. I was an albino, a freak. I had no skin at all. I was transparent, you could see the circulation of the blood.

 She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.

 “Sin’s a virus, that’s what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap. They’ve got clap now you can’t get rid of. Sin’s just exactly the same. We’ve got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What’s wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?” She opened her eyes wide—I could see the glue on her false eyelashes. “It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it’s wrong.”

 “You better start wearing a bra, missy. Thirteen years old, I should say. I had my first bra in the fourth grade. You don’t want ‘em hanging to your knees when you’re thirty, do you?”

 The hand that held the cigarette was missing one finger and the fingertip of the next. He smiled when he saw me looking at it. “You ever see a carpenter get a table in a restaurant? Table for three, please.”

 “Prison agrees with me. There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”

 “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them.”

 [He had] a lipless mouth so wide he looked like a Muppet, like his whole head opened and closed when he talked.

 “We need Christ’s antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls.”

 We were dying inside, my mother and I.

 God is dead, haven’t you heard? He died a hundred years ago, gave out from sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead.

 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. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers…three cheers for Eve.

 “She says, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’”

 To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. I had never been beautiful before. I didn’t think it went against Christ. Everybody needed to feel love.

 I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it.

 He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.

 A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved.

 Why did it seem all the same, why did it melt together like crayons left in the car on a summer day?

 A chaplain just came boy. I told him I’d rip out his liver if he bothered me again.

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

 I know it’s candy-stripers and Highlights, maybe a morphine drip if you’re a good girl.

 After all the fears, the warnings, after all…a woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.

 [The house] was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare.

 The teachers’ mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture.

 They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?

 I separated the shreds of hair, applied bleach to the roots, set the timer. If I left the mixture too long, it would eat huge bloody sores in her scalp and all her hair would fall out. I thought that might be interesting.

 Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

 If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

 My loneliness tasted like pennies.

 Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind.

 I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

 Without Percodan, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds.

 The name of the book was The Art of Survival. Every religion needs its bible, and I had found mine, not a moment too soon.

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

 It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive.

 Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words…words trailing their streamers of judgment. A wife got money from her husband and nobody said anything.

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

 “What’s this music?” I asked her.
“Miles Davis. Seven Steps to Heaven”. Seven steps, was that all it took?

 “Don’t fight the world. Your carpenter friend, he didn’t fight the wood, did he? He made love to it, and what he made was beautiful.” I thought about that. My mother fought the wood, hacking at it, trying to slam it into place with a hammer.

 I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands, shaping it into something I didn’t have to dread.

 She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.

 “I don’t believe in [love] the way people believe in God or the tooth fairy. It’s more like the National Enquirer. A big headline and a very dull story.

 “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.”

 I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

 “You’ve got a perfect face for makeup.” Of course I did—I was blank, anyone could fill me in.

 Brown patches appeared under my cheekbones, white on the ridges, dividing my otherwise dead beige face into a paint-by-number kit.

 A woman just had the Collected Anne Sexton sent. Hallelujah. Finally something else to read. The only books in the prison library without heaving bodices on the covers are a large-print edition of War and Peace and a tattered Jack London. Arf. Arf.

 How could anyone who loves Sexton produce work so unrelievedly bad? I am Womannn, hear me Roarrr. So just roar, please, it would be far less embarrassing for all concerned.

 The world parts for Olivia, it lies down at her feet, where you hack through it like a thorn forest.

 What I wouldn’t give to get high. To be mellow and sympathetic, not jagged and spiteful and ready to smack Justin in the head with his shovel…I tried to remind myself that he was only four, but after a while it didn’t seem like any excuse.

 A woman like her is a parasite, she fattens on injustice like a tick on a hog. Of course, to the tick, it’s a hog’s world.

 Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil.

 A boy with skin that looked like it had been grated handed me a joint…I sucked in the smoke, turning my head away from [the two year old] so she wouldn’t get stoned.

 Stores like churches in worship of the real. The quiet voices as the women handled Steuben glass, Hermes scarves. To own the real was to be real.

 “Poor Mr. Fred. He had a heart attack last year…but what do you expect of a man who’ll eat three dinners in a row?”

 “Feel the music…close your eyes and be inside it.”

 Ashes filtered into my dreams, I was the ash girl, born to these Santa Anas, born to char and aftermath.

 You have proved every bit as retarded as your school once claimed you were. You’ll attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention, won’t you?

 How many days, hours, minutes I have sat looking at the walls of this cell, listening to women with a vocabulary of twenty-five words or less?

 Ed drove me to the emergency room…he gave me a nip of the glove compartment Jim Beam. I knew it was bad if Ed was sharing his booze.

 “You’re lucky, we’ve got Dr. Singh on tonight. His father was a tailor. He does custom work.”

 In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos in the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show.

 Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness.

 They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

 She’d been listening to the music I’d heard that first night, the woman with tears in her voice.

 I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded; like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.

 “Don’t sulk. You’re acting just like a man.”

 I broke away from her, knelt down, the bottle broken inside its silver cage, perfume already soaking the pavement. I put my hands in the puddle. My childhood, my English garden, that tiny piece of something real.

 Well, that’s the way it is, Marmee. One little accident, and it’s all gone forever. Jo won’t like foster care, she’ll get moved around, shot. Amy’ll get adopted, she’s cute, but you’ll never see her again. Beth’ll croak and the other one’ll turn tricks in a park for dope.

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

 “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.”
“Least they get breakfast.”

 I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw.

 Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.

 “You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you’re too ethnic. Too classic. Too something.”
“Too ethnic?”
“It means brunette. Too small means breasts. Classic means old.”

 She liked to quote D.H. Lawrence: “Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.”

 “What was the best day in your life?”
“Today.”
“No…from before.”
I tried to remember, but it was like looking for buried coins in the sand. I kept turning things over, cutting myself on rusty cans, broken beer bottles hidden there, but eventually I found an old coin, brushed it off. I could read the date, the country of origin.

 Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.

 Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized it was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying “grand”. Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn’t mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passé.

 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.

 I could smell him. Either he’d pissed on himself or someone else had done the honors.

 The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality.

 “She’s never where she is,” I said. “She’s only inside her head.”

 “The difference between a true artist and everybody else…they can remake the world.”

 She was so transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily.

 “Break a leg!” I called after her, and cringed to see her trip on a sprinkler head.

 I didn’t know what to say. It was like watching someone you loved step on a land mine, all the parts flying around. You don’t know what to do with the pieces.

 “What are you going to learn from a woman like that? How to pine artistically? Twenty-seven names for tears?”

 His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.

 No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.

 [Ron was] out combing the world for what was most bizarre…if he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead.

 “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t. It’s against my religion.”
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”

 “How long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”

 She was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. I wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her.

 Ron smiled, crunching on bacon strips. “Poison, poison. And such small portions.”

 She said things that she thought were funny but nobody else laughed. She was like a woman in a film that was badly dubbed, either too fast or too slow. She bungled the punch lines.

 She fretted that her hairline was receding, that she was going to end up looking like Edgar Allen Poe.

 I don’t get any of this. Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. High desert. We should be buying an olive, a date palm. A frigging Jerusalem artichoke.”

 She seemed to be collapsing at the center, one arm wrapped around her waist, as if keeping herself from breaking in two.

 I wanted to seal myself up, while I still had something of my own I hadn’t given to Claire. I had to pull back or I would be torn away, like a scarf closed in a car door.

 “Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.”

 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.

 “If I knew what self-respect was, then maybe I’d known if I’d lost it.”

 I picked up the squarish white bottle still half full of pills. Butabarbitol sodium, 100 mg. It practically glowed in my hands. The worst always happened. Why did I keep forgetting that? Now I saw this was not just a bottle, it was a door. You climbed through the round neck of the bottle and came out somewhere else entirely. You could escape. Cash in your chips.

 I felt the pull of that dark circle, the neck of the bottle. It was a rabbit hole, I could jump down and pull it in after me. You never know when help might come. But I knew. It came and I turned my back, I let it down. I pushed my savior out of the life raft. I was panicked. Now I reaped my despair.

 It wasn’t bad here at Mac. If it weren’t for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn’t have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell-block or psych ward.

 Mac was a floor you could not fall below.

 What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise.

 I painted a mirror on the wall opposite Claire’s dresser where there was no mirror, and in the red-tinted darkness, my own staring image, with long pale hair, in the crimson velvet Christmas dress I never got a chance to wear. The me that died with her.

 People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words. They were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, there were this and now that, they couldn’t include all the meaning. In defining, they always left something out.

 I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

 I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.

 People who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.

 Workers of the world, arise. You got nothing to lose but Visa Card, Happy Meal, Kotex with Wings.

 I looked at the magazine over her shoulder. I could never figure out where they found all those happy, pimpleless teens.

 “You think they don’t got problem? Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.”

 “You think I’d look good blond?”
“It’s never done me much good.”

 To me this rock was more faceless sex in a man’s world.

 [They were] drinking Hunter’s Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

 “Love me a little. Love me, for we all going to die.”

 “Astrid’ll take me [to childbirthing class].”
I started coughing. I tried to do Butterfly McQueen from the childbirth scene in Gone with the Wind. “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies,” but I couldn’t get my voice to go high enough.

 I’d begun to think of my life as a series of Kandinsky pencil sketches, meaningless by themselves, but arranged together they would begin to form an elegant composition. I even thought I had seen the shape of the future in them. But now I had lost too many pieces.

 He was just like one of Rena’s white cats—eat, sleep, fornicate.

 Our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside.

 This is what is left of my world, an 8x8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name…they handcuff us even to shower. Well they should.

 I am hypnotized by keys, thick fistfuls of them, I can taste their acid galvanization, more precious than wisdom.

 You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.

 The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

 People who worked in the middle of the night…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 of life as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters.

 When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster?

 I turned on the beaded lamp that made everything look like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

 Women’s fear is a magnet. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God’s.

 They could lock her up, but they couldn’t prevent the transformation of the world in her mind.

 Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp…I was more like a car you parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where you’d left it.

 Yes, I was tattooed, just as she’d said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained…hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds.

 Sometimes, I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe. A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she’d always know where they were. They’re all in jail, alive.

 Yes, I was crying. These words like bombs she sealed up and had delivered, leaving me ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in the mirror.

 Who am I, Mother? I’m not you. That’s why you wish I were dead. You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act, I am forward movement in time.

 You could never judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better.

 The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune.

 Your arms cradle / poisons / garbage / grenades.

 Loneliness / long distance cries / forever / never / response.

 Stop / plotting murder / penitence / Cultivate it.

 I glued [your own words] to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. They’re in revolt.

 How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double.

 “You cannot think you will cut yourself free from me so easily. I live in you in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.”

 “Oh the praise, a jailhouse Plath! (Although I am no suicide, no baked poetess with my head among the potatoes.)”

 “You want to write me off? Try. Just realize when you’re cutting off the plank upon which you stand, which end of it is nailed to the ship.”

 I had freed myself from her strange womb, I would not be lured back.

 “What do you see?” I asked. Curious as to what bizarre distortions my image had undergone in the translation within the sewer system of Sergei’s mind.

 Sergei’s heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room.

 How could anyone confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair grey and unkempt, while beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and makes you close your eyes in prayer.

 “You had plastic Jesus and a middle-aged lover with seven fingers, you were held hostage in turquoise, you were the pampered daughter of a shadow. Now you are on Ripple Street, where you send me pictures of dead men and make bad poems of my words, you want to know who I am?”

 “The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned.”

 “Don’t hoard the past. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.”

 Everybody could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn’t we? “Because we’re not everybody,” my mother would say. “We’re not even remotely like everybody.” Except even she had dirty laundry.

 I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom.

 “We know your mother,” Julie said. “We visit with her in Corona.” Her children. Her new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege, and now I was being replaced by something un-mutilated, something intact?

 I was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising form the ash.

 “This is out-f***ing-rageous.”

 (On an acid high) The cashier looked like a tapioca pudding.

 An old lady in a tan pantsuit, tan face, tan hair, shoes, a yellow belt, came out of one of the stalls, stared at us. “She looks like a grilled cheese sandwich,” I said.

 I accompanied Yvonne to baby class…I couldn’t seem to take it seriously. I don’t know if it was the aftermath of the acid, but everything seemed funny. The plastic doll we handled looked like a space alien.

 I had only two months until graduation, and then a short fall off the edge of the world.

 I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper…she turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, clanked at me, then went back to sunny-side-up.

 “You ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? Why do they bother? Why not just drink turpentine?”

 ..men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when it rained.

 “Thought I might become a criminal lawyer. That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector.”

 The river flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me.

 What were any of us but a handful of weeds? Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck, missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.

 “We get all the bad dreams. We got to leave some for somebody else.”

 The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus.

 The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.

 I realized they didn’t [call out for] their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims…They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood…bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools…not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it. They wanted a the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a 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, wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

 Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother’s totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces.

 Their time together was a battleground full of white stones, grass grown over the trenches, a war I lost everything I had and had no way to know what happened.

 I wish she’d tell [the graduates] 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.”

 I had Yvonne, I had Niki. I had this Raphael sky. I had five hundred dollars and an aquamarine from a dead woman and a future in salvage. What more could a girl want.

 Rena got a deal on zebra-striped contact paper, so I zebra-striped barstools, bathroom scales, shoebox “storage units”. I striped the hospital potty chair, the walker, for zingy seniors. The cats hid.

 I shared a mug of Russian Sports Mix with Yvonne, a weak brew of vodka and Gatorade that Rena drank all day long.

 The Buddhists thought it shouldn’t matter whether it’s contact paper or Zen calligraphy, brain surgery or literature. In the Tao, they were of equal value, if they were done in the same spirit.

 Love is a check that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

 Time has taken on an utterly different quality for me. What difference does a year make? In a perverse way, I pity woman who are still a part of time, trapped by it, how many months, how many days. I have been cut free, I move among centuries.

 Alejandro the painter was very bad indeed. He should not have created at all. He should have simply sat on a stool and charged one to look at him.

 More broken children for Rena Grushenka’s discount salvage yard.

 I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.’

 “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack.”

 “You’re asking the wrong question. Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”

 “You should have been sterilized.”

 “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”

 “You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life. Since I came back for you, we’ve never been apart, until this.”
“The murder, you mean.”
“No, this. You, now….you know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me.”
“I was always waiting for you, Mother. It’s the constant in my life. Waiting for you.”

 “You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. 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 them, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

 “Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”

 [I] knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath.

 I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. 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. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.

 The phoenix must burn to emerge.

 And Claire. I built her a memorial from a train case from the thirties, white leather with red patent trim…it opened to a watermarked mauve moiré silk, like the grain in wood, like a funeral in a box…Each tiny cache drawer had a secret inside. A drawer full of pills. A strand of pearls. And in one drawer, twenty-seven names for tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Tränen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazón

 All my mothers. Like guests at a fairy-tale christening, they had bestowed their gifts on me...I carried all of them, sculpted by every hand I’d passed through, carelessly, or lovingly, it didn’t matter.

 I had seen her remorse, and it had nothing to do with Barry or anyone else, it was a gift offered despite a price she had had no way to estimate then, it could have been heavy as mourning, final as a tomb.

 No matter how much she had damaged me or how flawed she was, how violently mistaken, my mother loved me, unquestionably.

 Paul was more than my boyfriend. He was me.

 Now my mother was calling me, I didn’t have to get on the phone. I could hear her. My blood whispered her name.

 I saw the chain of disaster could move laterally as well as up and down.

 It was my legacy, wasn’t it, to shed lives like snakeskin, a new truth for each new page, a moral amnesiac?

 You want to remember, so just remember.

 How it bothered her that the doves would not leave, though the chicken wire had long since collapsed, the two-by-fours fallen. But I understood them. It was where they belonged, shade in the summer, their sad wooden flute calls. Wherever they were, they would try to get back, it was like the last piece of a puzzle that had been lost.

And the White Oleander movie:

White Oleander

 Ingrid: I raised you to think for yourself.
Astrid: No you didn't. You raised me to think like you.

 Ingrid: I made you. I'm in your blood. You don't go anywhere until I let you go.
Astrid: Then let me go.

 Astrid: You look at me, and you don’t like what you see. But this is the price, Mother—the price of belonging to you.

 Astrid: Looks don’t interest me.
Paul: That’s easy for you to say, you’ve never been ugly.

 Astrid: Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion.

 Astrid: Where does a mother end and a daughter begin?

 Rena: Workers of the world arise. You’ve got nothing to lose but Visa card, happy meal, and Kotex with wings.

 Astrid: My mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was also the most dangerous.

 Starr: Astrid, those are ugly shoes.
Astrid: Snakes don’t bite above the ankle.
Starr: Well, take my word for it, you’re better being bitten by snakes than dressin’ for them.

 Claire: What was the best day of your life?
Astrid: Today.

 Ingrid: Prison agrees with me. There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everyone knows it.

 Astrid: (talking about collages of her life in suitcases) Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning. The answer 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 wouldn’t tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them. But I’d set on 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 deserved 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 that being with someone so dangerous…was the last time that I felt safe.

 Astrid: My mother was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I know most people think that when they’re little, but she was the most beautiful woman most people had ever seen.

 Ingrid: Don’t attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you’re lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is know yourself…know what you want.

 Astrid: No matter how much she’s damaged me—no matter how flawed she is—I know my mother loves me.

 You’ve got to let go of who you were to become who you’ll be.

 Ingrid: We’re both in prison, you and I. Punished for our strength and our independence. Don’t forget who you are. The best part of me is well hidden and you have to do the same. Remember it all—every insult, every tear.

 Starr: “Why can’t I shove coke up my nose? Ain’t hurtin’ nobody…I have the right to feel good.” Because it hurts us…and it hurts Jesus.

 Ingrid: You write as if you are surprised to find me still beautiful, even here. Our beauty is our power, our strength. We can’t allow them to change us, to lessen us. I will never grant them that satisfaction, and neither should you.

 Ingrid: Love humiliates you. Hate cradles you.

 Ingrid: Of course I was jealous. I lived in a cell with a woman who has a vocabulary of 25 words.

 Claire Richards: Take my advice and stay away from broken people.

 Paul: I was born addicted to heroin.
Astrid: What was that like?
Paul: I don’t know—I was out of rehab by the time I was six months old.

 Carolee: Don’t look at me like that. You’re no different than I am—you just don’t know it yet.