Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

— Janet Fitch

2. “She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

5. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

7. “Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.”

— Janet Fitch

8. “Don’t hoard the past. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.”

— Janet Fitch

9. “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

12. “Never apologize. Never explain.”

— Janet Fitch

13. “Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.”

— Janet Fitch

14. “Who can judge another man’s suffering?”

— Janet Fitch

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

19. “My hatred gives me strength.”

— Janet Fitch

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

23. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

25. “Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.”

— Janet Fitch

26. “A fish has no concept of water.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

28. “And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

31. “That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.”

— Janet Fitch

32. “Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

34. “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

35. “What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler’s coat, something that didn’t belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn’t it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.”

— Janet Fitch

36. “My loneliness tasted like pennies.”

— Janet Fitch

37. “Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.”

— Janet Fitch

38. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

42. “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

43. “Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.”

— Janet Fitch

44. “Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

46. “Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.”

— Janet Fitch

47. “Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.”

— Janet Fitch

48. “We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.”

— Janet Fitch

49. “Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.”

— 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