hang me up to dry

White Oleander has got to be one of the best books I have ever read. I see myself reflected so harshly in this one and I kind of like it.

"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 their 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, get used to it.

"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 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, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us."

"I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten 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."

"No matter how much she had damaged me or how flawed she was, how violently mistaken, my mother loved me, unquestionably."

"It's the century of the displaced person, you can never go home."

"I would always know what time it was in California."