Top 100 Janet Fitch Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Janet Fitch
#3. Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.
Janet Fitch
#4. 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
#5. She's never where she is,' I said. 'She's only inside her head.
Janet Fitch
#6. For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.
Janet Fitch
#7. 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
#8. I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
Janet Fitch
#9. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It
Janet Fitch
#10. I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
Janet Fitch
#11. And if there is no god?
You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.
Janet Fitch
#12. The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.
Janet Fitch
#13. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
Janet Fitch
#15. There is no God, there is only what you want.
Janet Fitch
#16. I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.
Janet Fitch
#17. 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
#18. I write every day ... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.
Janet Fitch
#19. 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
#21. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.
Janet Fitch
#22. 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
#23. What was the point of the Devil if there was a God like that? Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this fucking world. Or maybe there was just nothing at all.
Janet Fitch
#24. Death disapearance was what you didnt talk about. like a sewer running under the street, the shit was down there, out of sight, but you could smell it, it didnt go away, it didnt vanish
Janet Fitch
#25. I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.
Janet Fitch
#26. Women writers specifically ... are the ultimate outsiders.
Janet Fitch
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
Janet Fitch
#30. My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
Janet Fitch
#31. We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand
Janet Fitch
#32. That was how you did it. You let go, you left all that behind, you refused to remember. You let the dark in.
Janet Fitch
#33. 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
#34. You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you
Janet Fitch
#35. Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
Janet Fitch
#36. The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.
Janet Fitch
#37. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Janet Fitch
#38. I just wanted to live in books and in movies.
Janet Fitch
#39. I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.
Janet Fitch
#40. She was used to taking the world as it was, she'd never have guessed you could get what you wanted by asking for it.
Janet Fitch
#41. The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.
Janet Fitch
#42. As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric sung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him. A jerk is forming inside my body. No it's not my heart.This it's harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me
Janet Fitch
#43. Love could never bloom in a concrete block room.
Janet Fitch
#44. My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.
Janet Fitch
#45. Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body's shadow theater.
Janet Fitch
#46. 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
#47. While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.
Janet Fitch
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Janet Fitch
#53. 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.
Janet Fitch
#54. I'm a fish swimming by Ray. Catch me if you want me.
Janet Fitch
#55. He had loved her, but he hated himself more.
Janet Fitch
#56. His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
Janet Fitch
#57. To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.
Janet Fitch
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.
Janet Fitch
#61. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.
Janet Fitch
#62. 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
#63. I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.
Janet Fitch
#64. Well, the universe had spoken. There was no one left to turn to.
Janet Fitch
#65. What isn't there is as important as what is, Phil always said.
Janet Fitch
#66. Why does each man kill the thing he loves? ... you killed it by accident. Thinking you were doing something else. It was a cherished vase that broke while you were cleaning it. The phone rang and you dropped it. Shattering, when all you wanted was to keep it safe.
Janet Fitch
#67. 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
#68. That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones.
Janet Fitch
#69. 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
#70. The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.
Janet Fitch
#71. 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.
Janet Fitch
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
Janet Fitch
#75. It was a shrine. Josie hadn't thought to do that. She had no shrine, no candles. She only knew how to kill the thing she loved
Janet Fitch
#76. her magenta lips a wolf's stained smile.
Janet Fitch
#77. For what is writing besides capturing thoughts that belong to all of us, so that we can recognize ourselves, undestand ourselves, and perhaps, each other. Every thoughtful book about love makes us better lovers, I think. It opens the gates of perception.
Janet Fitch
#78. 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
#79. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports.
Janet Fitch
#80. 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
#81. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.
Janet Fitch
#82. I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom
Janet Fitch
#83. My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.
Janet Fitch
#84. Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift.
Janet Fitch
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Janet Fitch
#87. You've never been ugly." The boy looked down at his hand filling the blank spaces in a science fiction scene. "Women treat you like you're a disease they might catch. And if in a weak moment they let you touch them, they make you pay.
Janet Fitch
#88. It wasn't awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn't want pain, she wouldn't want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn't unthinkable.
Janet Fitch
#89. We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
Janet Fitch
#90. She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
Janet Fitch
#91. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees.
Janet Fitch
#92. People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd.
Janet Fitch
#93. Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
Janet Fitch
#95. Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.
Janet Fitch
#96. 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.
Janet Fitch
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
Janet Fitch
#100. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.
Janet Fitch
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