In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside?

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 131

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ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 126

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now.

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 118

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy.

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 113

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

“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.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “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. I feel infinitely better now.”

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 32

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 32

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

It was as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see.

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 23

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 20

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company

I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?

– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 13

Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company