Janet Fitch citations

Page 2

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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….”

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

“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.”