Fitch Quotes & Sayings

Well, the universe had spoken. There was no one left to turn to. — Janet Fitch

I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent. — Janet Fitch

Echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back. — Janet Fitch

Fans want heroes. They're bored. They want a hero and want to follow that guy. — Jon Fitch

She took a life because someone
humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the
stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she
avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because you
felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could
have tolerated the humiliation. — Janet Fitch

The rifle and the pistol are still the equalizer when one man is more of a man than another, and if ... he is really smart ... he will get a permit to carry one and then drop around to Abercrombie and Fitch and buy himself a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, 'Woodsman model', with a five-inch barrel and a box of shells. I advise him to get lubricated hollow points to avoid jams and to ensure a nice expansion on the bullet. He might even get several boxes and practice a little ... — Ernest Hemingway,

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to. — Janet Fitch

But things coming out of her, visible to the world? It was in a strange way another loss. You gave things away you couldn't afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn't take it back. — Janet Fitch

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental. — 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

He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him. — 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

A phrase that would have sent Michael into ecstasies of loathing. Sort of Einstein meets Jayne Mansfield ... Hitler meets Roy Rogers. — Janet Fitch

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. 'You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him in 1918.' She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. 'Is fact. — Janet Fitch

Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us. — Janet Fitch

At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors' fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else's dumpster. She wasn't talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon. — 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

There is no God, there is only what you want. — Janet Fitch

And if there is no god?
You act as if there is, and it's the same thing. — Janet Fitch

The phoenix must burn to emerge. — Janet Fitch

When both men had their shirt off, as they did right now, it was like living in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad- a six-pack celebration, complete with triceps and biceps galore.
No doubt about it, Dolphina loved her new job. — Suzanne Brockmann

He couldn't call the bookstore haunted. Which Mark Richards considered a shame, really. — Donna K. Fitch

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know. — Janet Fitch

Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human. — Janet Fitch

Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner's Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk tie, she in her Lana Turner black lace and spike heels. How they peered down from their seats in the top balcony at the horseshoe of musicians with their stands and instruments. When the music stopped, Michael caught hold of her hand. Lacing his fingers in hers, he tenderly bit her knuckles. She would have been the only one applauding. — Janet Fitch

Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning, the reason is simple, I couldn't understand the beginning until I had reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, too much you would never tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them, but I'd set all this on fire first. She'd like that, that's what she would do. She'd make it just to burn it. I couldn't afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky, has ever been as clear and sharp as it was when I belonged to her. I don't know how to express the being with someone so dangerous is the last time I felt safe ... (White Oleander) — Janet Fitch

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I — Janet Fitch

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. — Janet Fitch

Dead or alive, interesting people are interesting people. — Noel Riley Fitch

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected. — 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

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 was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails. — Janet Fitch

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing. — Janet Fitch

That fucking crow-bodied thing had won. How gleeful it was now. All because he'd wanted to live, forget genius and destiny, and simply be happy. And it wouldn't let him. — Janet Fitch

A book's flaws make it less predictable. — Janet Fitch

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

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud. — Janet Fitch

Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about. — Janet Fitch

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer. — Janet Fitch

This is Zen", she said. "No flaw, no moment's hesitation. A window onto grace. — Janet Fitch

As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric sung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him. A jerk is forming inside my body. No it's not my heart.This it's harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me — Janet Fitch

Nature was always there, no matter what. — 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

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. — Janet Fitch

That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy. The — Janet Fitch

Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her. — Janet Fitch

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them. — Janet Fitch

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen. — Janet Fitch

They'd retreated to the country with two passports only. From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they'd never find the door. Nobody could guess at the gardens inside. — Janet Fitch

Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. 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

Love is temperamental. tiring. it makes demands. love uses you. changes its mind. — Janet Fitch

They were barely children, really, more like hyper badgers in Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts. — Molly Harper

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

A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night. — Janet Fitch

I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing. — Janet Fitch

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

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

This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue-people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet. — Janet Fitch

I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields. — Janet Fitch

Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. I do not like the way the cards are shuffled, But yet I like the game and want to play. — Eugene Fitch Ware

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

Doesn't anything matter to you?'
'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.'
'That's not much.'
I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that. — Janet Fitch

We get all the bad dreams, ese," she
said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. "We got to leave some for somebody else. — Janet Fitch

Let me guess. Dark hair, brown eyes, great abs, white teeth, Abercrombie & Fitch." "Close," I say. "Light brown hair, correct on the eyes, abs, and teeth, but American Eagle Outfitters all the way." "Impressive," she says. "My turn," I say. "Thick blonde hair, big blue eyes, an adorable little white dress with a matching hat, royal blue skin, and you're about two feet tall." She laughs loudly. "You have a thing for Smurfette? — Colleen Hoover

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched ... — Janet Fitch

snakes rarely bite above the ankles — Janet Fitch

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame. who in the world would have thot of her like that? when most people looked they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. but he saw past the mouth and the eyes. the archetecture of the body, her fleshy masquerade. other boys were happy enuf to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained by the bodys shadow theater but he had to come backstage. he went down into the mines. into the dark, brot up the gold. your new self, a better self. but wat good was it if he was jus gonna leave her behind. his poets lady, his silver lilly. he was a boy who knew things, things that looked one way but proved to be another. — Janet Fitch

Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world. — 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

I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. ( ... ) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette. — Janet Fitch

Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners? But — Janet Fitch

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears? — Janet Fitch

You have to have good training partners and not people who crank on things. There's a difference between cranking on it and catching it, holding it and making the guy work out. You have to be selective with your training partners for sure. — Jon Fitch

The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. — 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

Poverty is not primarily about money. It is about having no idea what to do and/or having no one with whom to do it. The former I called imagination and the latter I called community. To the extent that our neighborhood had imagination and community, we were not poor. But without imagination and community, no money could help us. . . . The role of the local church is to be a community of imagination [for the kingdom].12 — David E. Fitch

A womans mistakes are different from a girls — Janet Fitch

How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way? — Janet Fitch

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

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it. — 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

Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold. — 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

I'm very good at what I do and there's not too many people in the world that have an answer for what I can do. — Jon Fitch

These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain — Janet Fitch

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

Never apologize, never explain. — Janet Fitch

L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on. — Janet Fitch

His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn't, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell. — 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

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

She went to college where I knew she would call everyone honey and darling and all the men would love her. They would all love her and try to own her - try to break her legs to keep her from moving, and each of them would be frustrated and disappointed in the end. It was about loving someone who would never love you back or, maybe loving someone who loved everything, everybody, the same. She was too much and we all sacrificed a bit of ourselves for her. — Marc E. Fitch

How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer. — Janet Fitch

As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled. — 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

purification in fire. public cremation — Janet Fitch