Janet Fitch Quotes

106 Sourced Quotes

Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

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
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.

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

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

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

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
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.

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

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
The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

Janet Fitch
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 and then changed their minds.

Janet Fitch
They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?

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

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

Janet Fitch
You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

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

Janet Fitch
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.

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

Janet Fitch
Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

Janet Fitch
She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.

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

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

Janet Fitch