Janet Fitch Quotes About Mothers

Quotes about: Mothers

• The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.

  Janet Fitch

  Mother, Spring, Sleep

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.7, Hachette UK

• I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

  Janet Fitch

  Beautiful, Mother, Thinking

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.112, Hachette UK

• I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was 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.

  Janet Fitch

  Girl, Mother, Running

• I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

  Janet Fitch

  Mom, Mother, Imagine

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.41, Hachette UK

• You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

  Janet Fitch

  Daughter, Mother, Home

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.75, Hachette UK

• 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...mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in...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

  Mother, Pain, Real

• 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

  Mother, Children, Thinking

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

• 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

  Mother, Memories, Broken

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.246, Hachette UK

• I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

  Janet Fitch

  Mother, Queens, Eye

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

• The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

  Janet Fitch

  Beautiful, Mother, Art

• I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

  Janet Fitch

  Mother, Hands, Water

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

• she’s not as pretty as you,” I said “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.

  Janet Fitch

  Girl, Mother, Said

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.22, Hachette UK

• 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

  Mother, Chains, Ashamed

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

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