Janet Fitch Quotes

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
Janet Fitch
The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
Janet Fitch
Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
Janet Fitch
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
Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.
Janet Fitch
Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.
Janet Fitch
Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.
Janet Fitch
We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
Janet Fitch
I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty.
Janet Fitch
My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.
Janet Fitch
Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
Janet Fitch
Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.
Janet Fitch
don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.
Janet Fitch
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
Janet Fitch
The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.
Janet Fitch
Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. 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.
Janet Fitch
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.
Janet Fitch
She took a life because someonehumiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, thestainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So sheavenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because youfelt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you couldhave tolerated the humiliation.
Janet Fitch
If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... 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
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
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."-white oleander
Janet Fitch
Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?
Janet Fitch
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.
Janet Fitch
Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....
Janet Fitch
Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind..... 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 cradels you. It's so soothing. I feel infinetly better now
Janet Fitch
You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you
Janet Fitch
Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.
Janet Fitch
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? It should bloody well show.
Janet Fitch
For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.
Janet Fitch
A womans mistakes are different from a girls
Janet Fitch
I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.
Janet Fitch
For what is writing besides capturing thoughts that belong to all of us, so that we can recognize ourselves, undestand ourselves, and perhaps, each other. Every thoughtful book about love makes us better lovers, I think. It opens the gates of perception.
Janet Fitch
Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after
Janet Fitch
I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tellme more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, itwas base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many timeswith my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they justneeded to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was theway I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.
Janet Fitch
Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.
Janet Fitch
Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.
Janet Fitch
You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.
Janet Fitch
The phoenix must burn to emerge
Janet Fitch
Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.
Janet Fitch
Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
Janet Fitch
She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, "It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth." Instead of one who showed him how to die.
Janet Fitch
Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
Janet Fitch
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.
Janet Fitch
I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.
Janet Fitch
Loneliness ia a human condition
Janet Fitch
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
Janet Fitch
She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.
Janet Fitch
Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
Janet Fitch
don't sulk. you're acting just like a man.
Janet Fitch
Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.
Janet Fitch
She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
Janet Fitch
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
Janet Fitch
I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.
Janet Fitch
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
Janet Fitch
I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.
Janet Fitch
He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.
Janet Fitch
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.
Janet Fitch
I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
Janet Fitch
The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.
Janet Fitch
...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
Janet Fitch