Janet Fitch Quotes & Sayings

It wasn't awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn't want pain, she wouldn't want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn't unthinkable. — Janet Fitch

I wanted to be esteemed by the cognoscenti."
Josie heard her father in her head, See, I told you. She's laughin at you. "Sorry for being so ignorant, but is that a yes or a no?"
The dreamy look in Meredith's eyes dissolved, and the focused intelligence, self-conscious, returned. "By a special few. Those in the know. Cogno meaning recognition-cogitato, to think. — Janet Fitch

We have no home, she told me. I am your home. — Janet Fitch

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? — Janet Fitch

Always tell us where we are. And don't just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they're great at this. — Janet Fitch

The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away. — Janet Fitch

I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then. — Janet Fitch

The damned could be saved ... anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. — Janet Fitch

Beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. Time could rest for a moment, stop all that senseless motion. — Janet Fitch

Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife. — Janet Fitch

Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn't twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. — Janet Fitch

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California. — Janet Fitch

Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself ... know what you want. — Janet Fitch

They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler's fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking — Janet Fitch

His hands, shedding actual tears. The silky cold dirt and sharp pebbles of the road — Janet Fitch

They say time heals all wounds but they're lying — Janet Fitch

The phoenix must burn to emerge. — Janet Fitch

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled ... mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in ... mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us. — Janet Fitch

She couldn't help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn't as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be. — 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

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad. — Janet Fitch

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. — Janet Fitch

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. — Janet Fitch

My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation. — Janet Fitch

They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie. — Janet Fitch

On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat. — Janet Fitch

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of. — Janet Fitch

What is real is always worth it. — Janet Fitch

Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time. We — Janet Fitch

Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn't understand the nature of poisons. My — 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

Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash. — Janet Fitch

She was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway? — 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 past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. — Janet Fitch

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

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal. — Janet Fitch

Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words-say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy-if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you're generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed. — Janet Fitch

Men ... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy. — Janet Fitch

What did it mean, that the two people she loved best in the world hated each other? It was the sides of herself, irreconcilable. — Janet Fitch

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, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. — Janet Fitch

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

I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport. — Janet Fitch

Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing. — Janet Fitch

People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd. — Janet Fitch

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm. — 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

What's real is always worth it,' she explained to me. 'Look how it's made.' She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. 'You'll wear it your whole life. — Janet Fitch

She was tired, her nerves stripped like wires, the red and white. She felt like a saint with the arrows shit through, she was bleeding to death. — Janet Fitch

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

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering?
But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? — 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

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky. — Janet Fitch

Wasn't that the way it always was? You didn't know, you couldn't tell, you just let it happen ... Perhaps they didn't know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine. — 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

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

To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot. — Janet Fitch

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it. — Janet Fitch

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars. — Janet Fitch

Death now or death later, that was the real question. — Janet Fitch

He had loved her, but he hated himself more. — Janet Fitch

I'd seen a couple of Claire's movies now. She was transparent,
heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I'd spent the
last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I
wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.
She was naked, she peeled herself daily. — Janet Fitch

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? — Janet Fitch

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 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? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine. — Janet Fitch

You've never been ugly." The boy looked down at his hand filling the blank spaces in a science fiction scene. "Women treat you like you're a disease they might catch. And if in a weak moment they let you touch them, they make you pay. — Janet Fitch

Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed. — Janet Fitch

I write every day ... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good. — Janet Fitch

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. — Janet Fitch

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

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange."

~ White Oleander — Janet Fitch

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape. — Janet Fitch

I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not. — Janet Fitch

To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. — Janet Fitch

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness. — Janet Fitch

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 the 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.
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 someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, auwesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, 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, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us. — Janet Fitch

He was so damn perverse, he preferred to dream it than to make it come true. — Janet Fitch

At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score. — Janet Fitch

He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them. — 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

Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard. — Janet Fitch

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles. — Janet Fitch

What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. — Janet Fitch

This was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces — Janet Fitch

After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error. — 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

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough. — Janet Fitch

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

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

When anybody could tell, nobody was ever going to give fucking peace a chance. — Janet Fitch

The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love. — Janet Fitch

Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence. — Janet Fitch

He could sense the ridiculousness of life even as it tore the guts out of him. She saw that now. And death lay coiled in the dark between the perception and the pain. — Janet Fitch

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

How many people ask you to come share their life? — Janet Fitch

Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good. — Janet Fitch

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them. — Janet Fitch

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

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after. — Janet Fitch

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you — Janet Fitch

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light. — Janet Fitch

She cut a small piece of the gravalax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintily spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music. — Janet Fitch