Janet Fitch Quotes

“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.”

“I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.”

“How many people ask you to come share their life?”

“It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.”

“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.”

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

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

“How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.”

“The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.”

“without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.”

“To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.”

“beautiful girls have certain advantages.”

“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.”

“I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.”

“I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.”

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

“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.”

“You've got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.”

“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.”

“It's such a liability to love another person.”

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

“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.”

“Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.”

“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.”

“Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”

“… You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.”

“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.”

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

“But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.”

“If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”

“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.”

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

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

“They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?”

“When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

“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.”

“No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.”

“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.”

“How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.”

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

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

“How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?”

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

“Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.”

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

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

“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 hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.”

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

“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.”

“She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.”

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

“I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."
-white oleander”

“A womans mistakes are different from a girls”

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

“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.”

“A fish has no concept of water.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.”

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

“echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.”