Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch
At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.
'Paint it Black' by Janet Fitch
The armies of the ambitious. For them, the future was like a giant oxygen mask, as if there was nothing to breathe in the present. When the present was all there was ever going to be.
'Paint it Black' by Janet Fitch
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander