Janet Fitch Quotes

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

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

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

Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

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.

purification in fire. public cremation

Life should always be like this. ... Like lingering over a good meal.

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.

her scruffy innoscense to impregnate with his dreams. reason was seductive, it gave the appearance of truth

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?

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

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

A cliché is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

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.

at least if you were ignorant you could do wat you wanted. you had no idea wat had been acheived in the past. you were free instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

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

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

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.

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.

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

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

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

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

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

We recived our colouring from the Norsemen,hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees.We are the ones who sacked Rome.Fear only feeble old age and death in bed.Don't forget who you are.

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.

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.

You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

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.

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

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

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.

Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.

It's such a liability to love another person.

There is no God, there is only what you want.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

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