White Oleander by Janet Fitch

"I knew we shouldn't have come. 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."
(p.28)

"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. It's so soothing."
(p.38)

"The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself...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 though our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race."
(p.74)

"I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This is 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."
(p.104)

"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. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception. 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."
(p.126-127)

"Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words...words trailing their streamers of judgment...What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. 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."
(p.138)

"...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."
(p.146)

"...how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?"
(p.262)

"Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good."
(p.349)

"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, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?"
(p.430)