Janet Fitch Quotes (86 Quotes)

How many people ask you to come share their life?

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

Let me tell you a few things about regret...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 as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Life should always be like this. ... Like lingering over a good meal.

She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

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...

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.

Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

My loneliness tasted like pennies.

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

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.

I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.

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.

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.

The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

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

I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear aroung my neck. I wish a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.

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.

The night crackled ... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch...someone whoes fingers are a poem.

I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the woodstove.

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

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.

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful.

I'm a fish swimming by Ray. Catch me if you want me.

Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.

I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

There was no God there was only what you wanted.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

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.

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.