Janet Fitch Quotes

106 Sourced Quotes

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
What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

Janet Fitch
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.

Janet Fitch
That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

Janet Fitch
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

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

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

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

Janet Fitch
That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. You only got a taste, enough to know what perfection meant, and then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to a rock, who stole fire. The gods made an eagle eat his liver for all eternity. You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

Janet Fitch
Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

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

Janet Fitch
You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

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

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
And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

Janet Fitch
The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.

Janet Fitch
Without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.

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

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
She's not as pretty as you, I said But she's a simpler girl, my mother whispered.

Janet Fitch
I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. 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.

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

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

Janet Fitch