Cheese > Cheese's Quotes

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The price of a memory, is the memory of the sorrow it brings.”
― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

“Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
― Janet Fitch

“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?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, 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 cliches 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. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“It's such a liability to love another person.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Janet Fitch

“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 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

“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

“If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”
― 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

“I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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 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

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

“It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander