Fitch Even Quotes & Sayings

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

Even though he lived on the beach in college, he didn't have a tan. Now that's a serious player! — Bill 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

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

Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you! — 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,

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

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

The secret is
a magician doesn't buy magic. Admire the skill of a magician, but never fall under his spell. She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny. — 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 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

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 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 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

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

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape. — 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

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

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

And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother's gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn't let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction. — Janet Fitch

The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds. — 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

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

I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim. — Janet Fitch

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one. — Janet Fitch

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical. — Janet Fitch

The view of the highway was so bad that you could not even see the next viaduct. Te moment it loomed out of the mist it disappeared again, as if the world created itself and was blotted out again. — Janet Fitch

Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn't even want, just for the fun of destroying it. — Janet Fitch

Dying visions of angels and Christ and God and heaven are confined to credibly good men. Why do not bad men have such visions? They die of all sorts of diseases; they have nervous temperaments; they even have creeds and hopes about the future which they cling to with very great tenacity; why do not they rejoice in some such glorious illusions when they go out of the world? — Enoch Fitch Burr

Remember ... we don't see objects, we see light. [ ... ] Light can do anything water can do
flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do
paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners? But — 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

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

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

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

snakes rarely bite above the ankles — Janet Fitch

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

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

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

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

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

purification in fire. public cremation — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A womans mistakes are different from a girls — Janet Fitch