Top 100 Janet Fitch Quotes
#1. We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
Janet Fitch
#2. This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too.
Janet Fitch
#3. 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
#4. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.
Janet Fitch
#5. 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
#6. Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia
Janet Fitch
#7. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees.
Janet Fitch
#8. She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
Janet Fitch
#9. History only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.
Janet Fitch
#10. 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
#11. She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, "It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth." Instead of one who showed him how to die.
Janet Fitch
#12. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.
Janet Fitch
#13. I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn't want to stop. Blue
Janet Fitch
#14. 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
#15. And if there is no god?
You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.
Janet Fitch
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.
Janet Fitch
#19. 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
#20. Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
Janet Fitch
#21. 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.
Janet Fitch
#22. Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
Janet Fitch
#23. 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.
Janet Fitch
#24. 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. We
Janet Fitch
#25. She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.
Janet Fitch
#26. Her gut ached, as if love was being dug out of her with a dull knife.
Janet Fitch
#27. The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.
Janet Fitch
#28. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.
Janet Fitch
#29. 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
#30. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.
Janet Fitch
#31. To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.
Janet Fitch
#32. If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering?
But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?
Janet Fitch
#33. Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn't let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.
Janet Fitch
#34. The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.
Janet Fitch
#35. How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean?
Janet Fitch
#36. She's not as pretty as you," I said
"But she's a simpler girl," my mother whispered.
Janet Fitch
#37. People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors.
Janet Fitch
#38. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots
prostitute, housewife, saint
like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
Janet Fitch
#39. I would rather live out on the desert alone, like an old prospector. All I needed was a small water source. 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
#40. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it
Janet Fitch
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Nature was always there, no matter what.
Janet Fitch
#44. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.
Janet Fitch
#45. Her scruffy innoscense to impregnate with his dreams. reason was seductive, it gave the appearance of truth
Janet Fitch
#46. She was tired, her nerves stripped like wires, the red and white. She felt like a saint with the arrows shit through, she was bleeding to death.
Janet Fitch
#47. A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
Janet Fitch
#48. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
Janet Fitch
#49. These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain
Janet Fitch
#50. Don't tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they're not beating you, consider yourself lucky.
Janet Fitch
#51. Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
Janet Fitch
#52. Echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.
Janet Fitch
#53. How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.
Janet Fitch
#54. She yearned to call him, but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.
Janet Fitch
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.
Janet Fitch
#58. It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth.
Janet Fitch
#59. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.
Janet Fitch
#60. 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.
Janet Fitch
#61. 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
#62. A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.
Janet Fitch
#63. Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls.
Janet Fitch
#64. Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
Janet Fitch
#65. In a train ... smash. In his arm her last ... breath.' He had loved her. But he hated himself more. Such suffering, so much pain. And he thought it made him hateful. As if suffering was shameful, disgusting, as if pain were a crime. Who can judge another man's suffering?
Janet Fitch
#66. No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
Janet Fitch
#67. I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.
Janet Fitch
#68. As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.
Janet Fitch
#69. You've been everywhere, haven't you." I had, but it hadn't done me much good.
Janet Fitch
#70. That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.
Janet Fitch
#71. Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.
Janet Fitch
#72. I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
Janet Fitch
#73. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress
Janet Fitch
#74. She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn't really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable.
Janet Fitch
#75. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I
Janet Fitch
#76. Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.
He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.
Janet Fitch
#77. Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.
Janet Fitch
#78. Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster.
Janet Fitch
#79. Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched ...
Janet Fitch
#80. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.
Janet Fitch
#81. I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.
Janet Fitch
#82. Men ... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
Janet Fitch
#83. For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.
Janet Fitch
#84. They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler's fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking
Janet Fitch
#85. 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 separate worlds.
Janet Fitch
#86. I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.
Janet Fitch
#87. Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.
Janet Fitch
#88. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror."
"Who am I, Mother? I'm not you. That's why you wish I were dead. You can't shape me anymore.
Janet Fitch
#89. You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.
Janet Fitch
#90. Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.
Janet Fitch
#91. My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not
know, a shape filled with rain. Whenever I asked, she'd say, 'You
had no father. I'm your father. You sprang full-blown from my
forehead, like Athena.
Janet Fitch
#92. Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.
Janet Fitch
#94. 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. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.
Janet Fitch
#95. beautiful girls have certain advantages.
Janet Fitch
#96. How many people ask you to come share their life?
Janet Fitch
#97. No scorn like the scorn of an aging queen for a pretty girl with a crap fake DL.
Janet Fitch
#98. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman
who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no
standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like
Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when
it rained.
Janet Fitch
#99. After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.
Janet Fitch
#100. Well, 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.
Janet Fitch
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