Rachel Anderson > Rachel's Quotes

“There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.”
― christopher moore

“The music coming from inside sounded like robots fucking. And complaining about it. In rhythmic monotone. European robots.”
― Christopher Moore, You Suck: A Love Story

“I can be most colorful and inventive when I am angry.”
― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping

“Everyone is happier if they have someone else to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both.”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“Last time I really got to know myself it turned out there was a whole gang of bitches in there to deal with. I felt like the receptionist at a rehab center. They all had nice tits though, I gotta say.”
― Christopher Moore

“And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.”
― Christopher Moore, Bite Me

“This isn't where I intended to be. Killing a person has a funny way of getting your life off-track.”
― Erin Mitchell

“The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)”
― Warren Moore

“He was so damn perverse, he preferred to dream it than to make it come true.”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“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

“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

“I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. Words trailing their streamers of judgment. 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

“Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“When most people looked at Josie Tyrell, they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. But Michael saw past the mouth and the eyes, the architecture of the body, her fleshly masquerade. Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body's shadow theater. But Michael had to come backstage. He went down into the mines, into the dark, and brought up the gold, your new self, a better self. But what good was it if he was just going to leave her behind? ”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“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. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“My loneliness tasted like pennies.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

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

“...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 and then changed their minds.
”
― Janet Fitch

“She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“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. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.”
― Janet Fitch

“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.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.... I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you break the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Who can judge another man's suffering?”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“her scruffy innoscense to impregnate with his dreams. reason was seductive, it gave the appearance of truth”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black