"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."
— E.B. White (Charlotte's Web)

"The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself."
— Laozi

"
And they drank heavily, partied with great enthusiasm, and relished the drug culture; they moved in and out and slept around, and this was okay because they defined their own morality. They were fighting for the Mexicans and the redwoods, dammit! They had to be good people!

"
— John Grisham (The Brethren)

"But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. "
— Zadie Smith

"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes, remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of the poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to"
— Janet Fitch

"Your welcome means more to me, Ivy Alisha Tamwood, than a thousand souls. Watching Rachel work is a wonder of one catastrophe after another."
— Kim Harrison

"Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?"
— K-Ske Hasegawa (Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1)

"I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!"
— Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)

"Everything was against us."
— Second Officer Lightoller, Senior Surviving Officer of Titanic

"Oh where, oh where had Snow White gone?
She'd found it easy, being pretty
To hitch a ride into the city."
— Roald Dahl (Revolting Rhymes)

"The 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."
— Janet Finch

""the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.""
— Jim Goad (The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats)

""Rachel candy.""
— Kim Harrison

"Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man."
— James Ellroy

"The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action."
— Geraldine McCaughrean

"You and I both know, deep in your heart, you agree with me. And I will prove it with one hypothetical scenario: you are alone in a closet of your home. There`s a bright red button. You can push that button and presto all Negroes and Jews and all other colored people are instantly removed from the North American continent and returned to their native countries.
You`d push it, wouldn`t you whitey?
See? See? See? in the final analysis, you agree with me.
But of course, you wouldn`t do antything to bring that scenario about, or any other scenario favorable to your Race.
"
— Frazier Glenn Miller (A White Man Speaks Out)

"I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. 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. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked god if they could stay. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"And 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 seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"Noir sur Blanc
In many instances, human’s desire is irrefutable
Thus if a truthful effort wouldn’t earn accomplishment,
A dishonest attempt would be more tolerable than expunging his wish
"
— dame trahie

"Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn`t bother them at all. The untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere."
— Russell Means (Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means)

"I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on "Seinfeld.""
— Aaron McGruder

""Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?"
"Do you feel heroic?"
"No."
"Then you probably aren't.""
— Don DeLillo

"...it seems that if we are to enjoy anything then we must mot have to think about it, and, conversely, if we are to think about anything, then we mustn't enjoy it."
— Barbara White (in the Preface to Exercises In Style)

""If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.""
— Frank B. Wilderson III

"The past cannot be change,
The future is still in your power."
— Hugh White (Nature and Salvation in Piers Plowman)

"You are one corrupt, perfectly white flower, yearning for its own reflection, in the calm waters"
— Die

"How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. It's teeth were bad, it's hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was as empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in prayer."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far they must've come to have settled in the concrete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn't want to think about my mother anymore.
I'd rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to re-establish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds.


My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood. 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.

They wanted 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, a wide hipped mother, auwesome, 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, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us.
"
— Janet Fitch

"People say Jesus Christ is a god, and they pray to him. Likewise, the Navajos have a god. He is an everlasting god who never dies, and we pray to him for everything. We were created from white shell in a sacred, holy way. Part of the white shell was taken and put in our bodies, but no one can see it. White Shell is a god. We pray to her "to give us the invisible white shell shoes, white shell socks, clothing, feathers," and so on. This god is female and is out there, but we cannot see her. "
— John Holiday

"I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold."
— Erik Larson

"Having achieved what I thought was an ultimate ambition, I found, as I think is often the case, that there remained something more."
— John Christopher

""If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference." "
— Abraham Lincoln

"Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

"Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him;"
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House-- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
— John F. Kennedy

"He just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as glacier milk..."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"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."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"The rapacious white tribe who were arriving in increasing numbers, not only as convicts but also as settlers, wanted to own everything they touched. They slashed and burned the wilderness so that they might graze their sheep and grow their corn. They erected fences around the land they now called their own and which henceforth they were prepared to defend with muskets and sometimes even their lives. They built church steeples and prison walls and homes of granite hewn from the virgin rock and timber cut from the umbrageous mountain forests. They possessed everything upon the island, the wild beasts that grazed upon its surface, the birds that flew over it, the fish that swam in its rushing river torrents and the barking seals resting in the quiet bays and secluded inlets. Everything they thought worthwhile was attached to the notion of ownership."
— Bryce Courtenay (The Potato Factory)

"Put black on white."
— Maupassant(de)/Guy