White Oleander

White Oleander is a universe-expanding, skin-thickening book. It is rough and empowering. It grants readers a connection to people, both ordinary and extraordinary, with all their frailties, their flaws, their beauty, their games, their will. It is poetically realistic.  Some of my favorite quotes from it:

• Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you and allows your soul room to grow.
•  That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of the words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones.
•  I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy…a prisoner…brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now.
• This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.
• 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.
•             Life should always be like this…Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it…As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.
• The mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.
•  His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution.
•  A man I wanted like falling.
• Feel the music, Astrid. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and be inside it.
• How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
• The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
• The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.
• I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm church as a monument to loss. Nobody forgot anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.
• We were the wild children with all the talent.