Janet Fitch famous quotes


Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. 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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Inspirational #Disappointment #Loneliness

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

#Tattoo #Artist #Mind

It's such a liability to love another person.
-- Janet Fitch

#Liability #Persons

Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.
-- Janet Fitch

#Love Is #Hatred #Mind

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.
-- Janet Fitch

#Fingers

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

#Lonely #Space #Want

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.
-- Janet Fitch

#Memories #Landscape #Dimensions

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Becoming #Body #Scar

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Dream #Pain #Sick

Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
-- Janet Fitch

#Artist #Past #Phoenix

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

#Flower #Snow #Focus

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

#Ivory #Dry #Tables

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Survival #Suffering #Care

Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
-- Janet Fitch

#People #Broken #Advice

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

#White #Oysters #Pearls

It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
-- Janet Fitch

#Want #Natural

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Hurt #Would Be #Stitches

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.
-- Janet Fitch

#Loneliness #Tunnels #Soul

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Girl #Rain #Gun

The phoenix must burn to emerge.
-- Janet Fitch

#Inspiring #Failure #Phoenix

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Spring #Sleep

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Heart #Water #Poetry

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Queens #Eye

The night crackled ... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.
-- Janet Fitch

#Night #Hair #Sparks

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Chains #Ashamed

Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
-- Janet Fitch

#Taught #Apologizing #Made

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

#Love #Beautiful #Eye

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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Want #Way #Cattle

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Imagine #Dare

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked...
-- Janet Fitch

#Numbness #Broken #Way

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

#Beauty #Girl #Dream

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

#Rocks #Want #Pale

...I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.
-- Janet Fitch

#Tired #Beer #Men

Life should always be like this. ... Like lingering over a good meal.
-- Janet Fitch

#Meals #Should

Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.
-- Janet Fitch

#Stronger #Emeralds #Crystals

We recived our colouring from the Norsemen,hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees.We are the ones who sacked Rome.Fear only feeble old age and death in bed.Don't forget who you are.
-- Janet Fitch

#Rome #Tree #Age

I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
-- Janet Fitch

#Song #California #Smell

That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. You only got a taste, enough to know what perfection meant, and then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to a rock, who stole fire. The gods made an eagle eat his liver for all eternity. You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.
-- Janet Fitch

#Fire #Rocks #Eagles

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.
-- Janet Fitch

#Zero #Taken #Gestures

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

#Lines #Way #Sometimes

When most people looked at Josie Tyrell, they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. But Michael saw past the mouth and the eyes, the architecture of the body, her fleshly masquerade. Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body's shadow theater. But Michael had to come backstage. He went down into the mines, into the dark, and brought up the gold, your new self, a better self. But what good was it if he was just going to leave her behind?
-- Janet Fitch

#Eye #Dark #Boys

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

#Play #Symphony #Lines

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Memories #Broken

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

#Thinking #Past #America

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
-- Janet Fitch

#Men #Firsts #Screwed Up

She wanted to wake up like Dorothy and see Michael's face peering over the side of the bed, laughing. WHY, YOU JUST HIT YOUR HEAD. But it was not a dream and there was no Kansas and he was never coming back.
-- Janet Fitch

#Dream #Kansas #Laughing

A womans mistakes are different from a girls
-- Janet Fitch

#Girl #Mistake #Different

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.
-- Janet Fitch

The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
-- Janet Fitch

#Laughter #Night #Smell

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

#Confused #Coffee #Smell

There is no God, there is only what you want.
-- Janet Fitch

#Want #What You Want #There Is No God

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mean #Artist #Self

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

#Beautiful #Needs #Way

Who can judge another man's suffering?
-- Janet Fitch

#Men #Judging #Suffering

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.
-- Janet Fitch

#Home #Writing #Exercise

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked... One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.
-- Janet Fitch

#Running #Writing #People

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.
-- Janet Fitch

#Beautiful #Mother #Thinking

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

#Life #Praise

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.
-- Janet Fitch

#Thinking #Elements #Movement

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
-- Janet Fitch

#Couple #Thinking #Play

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.
-- Janet Fitch

#Notebook #Writing #Night

Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.
-- Janet Fitch

#Dream #Hangover #Wake Up

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

#Home #Faces #Ashes

without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.
-- Janet Fitch

#Past #Faces #Scar

I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mean #Someday #Shows

I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.
-- Janet Fitch

#Mother #Children #Thinking

We have no home, she told me. I am your home.
-- Janet Fitch

#Home

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.
-- Janet Fitch

#Numbness #Emptiness #Detachment

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

#Beautiful #Feet #Clothes

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
-- Janet Fitch

#Sad

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

#Happy Birthday #Party #Cake

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

#Girl #Mistake #Fire

What is real is always worth it.
-- Janet Fitch

#Real #Worth It

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you
-- Janet Fitch

#Daughter #Mother #Home

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.
-- Janet Fitch

#Past #Smell #Cooking

I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. 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.
-- Janet Fitch

#Light #Hopeful #Mind

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.
-- Janet Fitch

#Sweet #Battle #Excess