Janet Fitch citations

“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.”

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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