chrissy > chrissy's Quotes

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“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 use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Trust is important. I think it's more important than love. I mean, I love all kinds of things I don't trust. Thunderstorms... white liquor... snakes. Sometimes I think I love them because I can't trust them, and how mixed up is that?”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

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

“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have the opposite effect, of make my need greater. I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I understood why she did it. 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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female”
― Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“I think it’s good to be afraid. It means that I’m alive.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts